Development of the Next-Generation GREET Software

Background Argonne National Laboratory’s Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies (GREET) life cycle analysis (LCA) model has been funded by multiple offices across the U.S. Department of Energy for over 28 years. It is already used by over 55,000 stakeholders worldwide to evaluate the energy and environmental effects of hundreds of fuel pathways, over 60 materials, vehicles and other technologies. The current GREET model is developed in Excel and .net platforms.

With the support of The Office of Technology Transitions (OTT), Argonne National Laboratory is developing the next-generation GREET software, aiming to deliver enhanced user experience and LCA functionalities. The next-generation GREET software will be developed with modern programming languages for user-friendly experiences, enhanced user accessibility, and ease of maintenance and expansion.

Existing open-source packages/frameworks will be leveraged to accelerate the development of the next-generation GREET software. Scope The development of the next-generation GREET software includes the development of:

1) intuitive user interfaces to enable enhanced user experience and user accessibility. These user interfaces will help users intuitively develop and conduct LCA modeling of technology pathways to leverage the extensive GREET databases and to incorporate users’ technology-specific data;

2) state-of-the-art software architecture that allows for customized interface development for new modules and for incorporating existing modules such as the H2 module, marine module, SAF module, and battery module;

3) graphic presentation of LCA results for easy interpretation of LCA results and comparison with selected pathways;

4) a robust backend to enable accurate, efficient, and flexible LCA calculations;

5) structured databases to store the built-in pathways with supply chain and process level details, as well as new pathways created by users, which is key to enhance data transparency and traceability, as well as modeling of scope emissions;

6) a version control system with an intuitive user interface to track user changes to the database and facilitate collaborative work on the dataset;

7) a consistent LCA calculation algorithm using established guidelines and protocols to minimize human programming and data input errors; and 8) automatic generation of summary LCA reports with customized templates by agencies and users. The contractor will work closely with the research team at ANL to understand the fundamentals and overarching issues of LCA and develop the next-generation GREET software to perform accurate LCA calculations and address the overarching issues. Specifically, the contractor will:

1) design a modern user interface to enable an intuitive user experience and enhanced user accessibility. The user interface should provide enhanced accessibility to various user groups, including those with disabilities, with a goal of compliance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act;

2) improve on the existing GREET.net calculation engine to develop robust, efficient, parallel, expandable calculation algorithms that can calculate different environmental impacts such as GHG emissions, calculate contributions across the chain of custodies and supply chain processes, and quantify GREET outputs with new LCA calculation methods. The calculation engine will enable dynamic modeling over time and stochastic modeling to address variability and uncertainty in LCA. The calculation engine can utilize multiple CPU cores in a machine when handling computation-heavy tasks such as batch-mode sensitivity analysis and uncertainty analysis for improved efficiency;

3) implement an expandable, customizable data structure that has a core, structured data format, but remains flexible and expandable for interoperability with other data formats, without the need for modifying the underlying calculation algorithms for LCA with the standard methodology.

This data structure can be expanded to include additional data attributes, e.g., ownership, data source, data category, confidentiality, etc. The data structure allows the storage of not only all the input for calculation but also the LCA results to facilitate data sharing between users and improve transparency. The user who receives an input dataset should be able to replicate the analysis and reproduce the same results as the user who created the dataset;

4) develop application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow the development of new modules for the GREET software, accessibility through web-based applications/interfaces, and cloud computing for enhanced accessibility, transparency, model updates and expansion, complex but efficient applications, and broader collaboration;

5) develop a process to generate a summary LCA report with customized templates that pull model details, such as foreground and background data used in simulations of technology, as well as their associated data attributes, such as data sources/references and notes, LCA results;

6) develop a process to streamline the annual update of the GREET software to allow researchers to incorporate updates and new pathways into the GREET database preferably via a user interface and without writing codes. The process should also allow for version control to track the author and date of each update and the changes made;

7) create a user manual to document the functionality of the new GREET software;

8) provide all the source code to Argonne, which should be clean and documented for Argonne researchers to maintain, scale, and expand the new GREET software by themselves; and 9) select and set up a state-of-the-art and open-source database management system that can operate with the data schema and ensure the data durability, consistency, and integrity to the GREET users.