Tools for Industrial Ecology Modeling (TIEM)

The US Environmental Protection Agency created and maintains a collection of open-source tools in the realm of industrial ecology, collectively referred to as TIEM (Tools for Industrial Ecology Modeling). TIEM was formerly referred to as the LCA tool ecosystem.

TIEM can potentially be used in a broad array of applications that require large and consistent sets of facility and sector-level environmental and economic data as well as modeled impacts associated with agricultural, extractive, utility, industrial, service and government sector activities. They have common attributes in that they are modular, available on github, and are generally used either at the command-line or in integrated development environments that are generic (e.g., Visual Studio) or more language-specific (e.g., RStudio).

Releases representing EPA quality-assured and cleared versions are distributed on the respective tool github sites. Most tools produce output in well-defined formats as tabular data that can be written to spreadsheets; others produce more complex objects like openLCA schema JSON-LD archives or native R data objects.

Each tool has a Wiki with additional instructions and details on its associated github page.

Users are encouraged to participate actively in their development by asking and answering questions in the associated github discussion board, reporting bugs in the issue tracker, and by contributing code using procedures defined in the Wikis that draw on github’s pull request feature.

Tool	Class(es)	Source Code Language	Description
Federal LCA Commons Elementary Flow List	Standardization	Python	Generates and provides a standardized elementary flow list for use in LCA data as well as mappings to convert data from other sources.
LCIA formatter	Standardization	Python	Standardizes the format and flows of LCIA data.
Standardized Emissions and Waste Inventories (StEWI)	Flow data/Standardization	Python	A collection of modules that provide processed USEPA emission and waste generation facility inventory data in standard tabular formats.
Flow Sector Attribution (FLOWSA)	Flow data/Standardization/Model Building/Visualization	Python	Attributes resource use, waste, emissions, and loss to economic sectors.
Electricity Life Cycle Inventory	Model Building	Python	Uses standardized facility release and generation data to create regionalized life cycle inventory models for the generation, mix of generation, mix of consumption, and distribution of electricity to end users for the US, with embedded system processes of upstream fuel production and infrastructure.
Ecosystem Utilities	Supporting	Python	A common support library for the ecosystem tools
useeior	Model Building/Flow data/Visualization	R	An R package for creating USEEIO models
stateior	Model Building/Flow data	R	An R package for creating multi-region Make and Use tables for US states
Supply Chain Greenhouse Gas Emission Factors	Flow data/Model Building	R Markdown	A notebook that uses useeior along with model specification files and supporting scripts to generate the Supply Chain GHG Emission Factors
USEEIO API	API	Go	Serves the components and calculated results from USEEIO Family Models
USEEIO widgets	Visualization	React/Javascript	Generates prebuilt components to visualize the USEEIO model for use in web pages

Functional Classification 

The tools are classified by one or more of the following general functions:

1. Standardization - Provide standardized lists or otherwise disparate models results in standardized format.
2. Flow data producers - Provide large and consistent sets of facility and sector-level environmental and economic inputs and output.
3. Modeling Building - Tools for sector attribution modeling, life cycle assessment, and input-output modeling.
4. API - A data-serving application programming interface (API).
5. Visualization - Provide data visualization.
6. Support - Libraries that not intended for end use that provide a common resource to other tools.

Uses

TIEM is used to build the:

• US Environmentally-Extended Input-Output (USEEIO) models, and
  Defense Input-Output (DIO) database
• Federal LCA Commons Electricity Baseline
• Federal LCA Commons Elementary Flow List
• Various datasets of
  national environmental flow totals by industry sector, and
  life cycle impact assessment methods for use with Federal LCA Commons Data.
• among others.

Related Presentations and Publications

• Open Source Tool Ecosystem for Automating LCA Model Creation and Linkage
• Life Cycle Inventory Modeling at EPA: From Workflows to StEWI
• A System for Standardizing and Combining U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Emissions and Waste Inventory Data
• Standardized Emissions and Waste Inventories (StEWI)
• LCA Tool Ecosystem