Abstract
Social life cycle assessment is an important method to assess products’ social impacts throughout their life cycles. There are already some indicators and software to assist conducting social life cycle assessment. However, it is hard for users to share or reuse assessment results because of different application data structures. To resolve this problem, a knowledge-based social life cycle assessment–aided design method is developed in this research. With this method, all elements in the social life cycle assessment process are analyzed and represented as classes, their relationships are described as object properties, and the data structure is represented as data properties to construct an ontology system for social life cycle assessment. Based on the ontology, a social life cycle assessment–aided product development web is developed. According to the data property structure, a bidirectional mapping between database and ontology is realized using JENA and ontology-based data access, which enables the result data to be automatically inputted into ontology individuals. Thus, the result data can be accumulated, shared, and reused among users. A case study with a floor product as well as a user test is carried out to prove the feasibility and usability of the web. The ontology-based social life cycle assessment–aided design method provides users with a new high-efficiency approach, setting the foundation for the intellectualization of life cycle assessment.
Highlights
Life cycle assessment (LCA) was first introduced in 1993 during the conference of ‘‘Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry,’’1 and considerations about society and social economy were mentioned in this conference
It was emphasized that close attention should be paid to environmental impacts caused by social impacts directly or indirectly, social impact was not included in LCA at that time
Of this article, the related works and the objective of the research are presented in section ‘‘Related works and objectives of this research,’’ and the development of ontology-based Social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) system and the S-LCA-aided product development web are presented in sections ‘‘Development of ontology for the LCA process’’ and ‘‘Development of S-LCA-aided product development web,’’ respectively, followed by a case study described in section ‘‘Case study of a floor product S-LCA.’’ And the conclusions are presented in section ‘‘Conclusion.’’
Summary
Life cycle assessment (LCA) was first introduced in 1993 during the conference of ‘‘Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry,’’1 and considerations about society and social economy were mentioned in this conference. The ‘‘GuideLines for S-LCA of Products,’’ or ‘‘GuideLines’’ for short, was first complied in 2009, for the purpose of evaluating the application of S-LCA It explains how social impacts work on the life cycle (LC) of products and proposes a valid assessment framework, which represents the consensus of the research experts in this field. Majority of S-LCA research is conducted based on the GuideLines where the S-LCA is defined as a technique to conduct social impact assessment. Some different methods were developed by researchers. An S-LCA-aided product development web is developed, which can integrate different S-LCA software based on the developed knowledge system. This research applies ontology into S-LCA, to help develop a knowledge-based system, which can make S-LCA result data be accumulated and directly reused by different users. Of this article, the related works and the objective of the research are presented in section ‘‘Related works and objectives of this research,’’ and the development of ontology-based S-LCA system and the S-LCA-aided product development web are presented in sections ‘‘Development of ontology for the LCA process’’ and ‘‘Development of S-LCA-aided product development web,’’ respectively, followed by a case study described in section ‘‘Case study of a floor product S-LCA.’’ And the conclusions are presented in section ‘‘Conclusion.’’
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