Contest entry - database explorer

[RomainBes]

Submitter

We are Romain Besseau and Oliver Hurtig, and we are both working at the Joint Research Center in Ispra in the north of Italy. Our work includes LCA of bioenergy pathways, and in that context, we started to develop some visualization tools that we are happy to share with you. We were on a rush so many things can be improved, especially the performance of the dashboard function. The new GraphTraversal takes something between 15 minutes and 1 hour to run depending on the dataset... But once this calculation optimized, we hope you will be convinced by the potential of the toolbox and the dashboard! The possibility is select various LCIA method is not implemented but will be once the calculation will be faster.

Description

We present you the toolbox database explorer and its dashboard that is designed to help explore and analyze the content of a database on a given topic.

This toolbox includes functions to:

• explore the datasets contained into a database
• analyze the difference between those datasets in terms of inventories and impacts
• do some contribution analysis in terms of substances and processes (however, we lose the tree representation on these graphs)
• get an interactive dashboard to analyze the impact chain of an activity. You then get sunburst representations of respectively positive and negative impacts. Those positive and negative impacts are also represented on a waterfall. Finally, you also have an interactive sankey diagram.

Database(s) used

• Used example data from the contest repository
• Used another database 👉 [ecoinvent 3.7 database cut-off]

Links to the code and visualization

Code

The code is here on GitHub, or here.

Visualizations

Visualisations are here or here.

Presentation video

The video is here.

License

MIT License

[cmutel]

@RomainBes Thanks for you entry, it was received in time and meets the criteria for a successful submission. We will have a final jury meeting in mid-March, and you can expect feedback by the end of March.

[cmutel]

@RomainBes Your entry has been selected for inclusion in a new Brightway graphics library. However, we need a better name, as we will include other contest entries and more besides. Would you like to come up with something on your own?

[ALFA-LCA]

@cmutel cool, we are happy if it is useful!
What part should be included? The more exploratory part best adapted to analyse and compare activities and contributions in a notebook, or the dashboard (not visible in the video by the way as there was a recording error) best adapted to share and visualize results, especially with positive and negative contributions? Or all? This would change the name. We don't have any incredibly good names, so feel also free to adapt it to fit with the other parts of the library. Oliver

[RomainBes]

Dear brightway community,

Where could I find the new brightway graphics library?

Indeed, we realized our contribution was too complexe to be used, even by us.

In the enclosed zip file, we simplified it a lot to provide only 3 simple but useful functions. The functions take as argument the lca object, and enables to plot:
1- a figure showing the contribution by substance and process
2- an interactive Sankey diagram
3- an interactive Sunburst diagram (we solved some issues using a digraph model to remove problematic nodes in the sunburst)

There is a short notebook example in the zip file.

CA_visualisation.zip

Hoping those functions can be useful to other brightway users, and integrated in the brightway visualisation library I could not find, or the the bw-analyser eventually?

Romain