Activity Browser - a GUI for Brightway2

The activity browser is an open source software for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) that builds on top of the Brightway2 LCA framework.

This fork adds a plugin system to Activity Browser to let people create new functionalities to the software and share them easily.

See the original project for the complete README, with installation instructions and full documentation.

Contents

• Quickstart
• Setup dev environment
• Running pytest
• Plugin manager doc
• Authors
• Copyright
• License
• Additional Resources

Quickstart

You can install and start the activity-browser like this:

conda create -n ab -c pan6ora -c conda-forge activity-browser
conda activate ab
activity-browser

Plugins

This section list known Activity Browser plugins. To add your plugin to the list open a pull request or contact Rémy Le Calloch.

Name	Description	Links	Author
template	An empty plugin to start from	anaconda, github	Rémy Le Calloch
Notebook	Use Jupyter notebooks from AB	anaconda, github	Rémy Le Calloch
ReSICLED	Evaluating the recyclability of electr(on)ic product for improving product design	anaconda, github	G-SCOP Laboratory

Setup dev environment

You will need to have python3 and conda installed (as some dependencies are not on pip).

Then, create the environment with the following commands:

conda create -n local_dev -c pan6ora -c conda-forge activity-browser
conda activate local_dev
conda remove --force activity-browser

This create a conda environment named local_dev with all Activity Browser packages, then remove the package activity-browser itself (as we are going to launch it directly from the content of this repository).

To start Activity Browser clone the repo, switch to conda environment and run run-activity-browser.py.

Running pytest

Install pytest to perform automatic testing:

conda activate local_dev
conda install pytest pytest-qt

If Pytest complains about not finding some packages do the following:

conda deactivate
pip uninstall pytest
conda activate local_dev
conda install pytest pytest-qt

Run pytest:

pytest

Plugin Manager doc

Main characteristics

• A plugin is a conda package named ab-plugin-XXX
• A plugin can add any content in two tabs (Left/Right)
• Plugins connect to AB through signals
• Plugins can be selected by project

Creating a plugin

The best place to start is the plugin template. It's code and README will help you to understand how to create a plugin. Two things you may want to remember of are :

classes

There are two main classes :

• Plugin is the main class defined in the init file of the plugin. It inherit from the Plugin class defined in Activity Browser.
• PluginTab is the mother class of every tabs the plugin will add to AB interface (one on each left/right panel).

hooks

The plugin class has 3 methods that are run by AB at a certain point :

• load() is run each time the plugin is added tp the project or reloaded. It kind of replaces the init method.
• close() is run when AB get closed.Put there the code to end your plugin properly.
• remove() is run when the plugin is removed from the current project. Use it to clean the place.

Storage

Plugins data

Datas are added per-project. The plugin can add everything it needs in the project folder.

Project plugins

To keep track of plugins used in a project, an entry is added to project settings :

/home/user/.local/share/Brigtway3/default.xxx/AB_project_settings.json
{
    "plugins_list": [
        "MyFirstPlugin",
        "MySecondPlugin"
    ],
    "read-only-databases": {
        "biosphere3": true,
        "Idemat": true
    }
}

Authors

Plugin manager

• Rémy Le Calloch ([email protected])

Activity Browser

• Bernhard Steubing ([email protected])
• Matthijs Vos ([email protected])
• Adrian Haas ([email protected])
• Chris Mutel ([email protected])
• Daniel de Koning ([email protected])

Contributing projects

The development of the Activity Browser was co-financed by the following projects:

• Life Cycle Management of wood in Switzerland (Swiss National Science Foundation, NRP 66 Resource Wood project number 136623)
• MIN-TEA (Materials Innovative Technologies Assessment; EIT Raw Materials project number 18231)

Copyright

• 2017-2020: Bernhard Steubing and Daniel de Koning (Leiden University), Adrian Haas (ETH Zurich)
• 2016: Chris Mutel and Paul Scherrer Institut
• 2015: Bernhard Steubing and ETH Zurich

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Additional Resources

Activity Browser:

• Activity Browser: overview paper https://doi.org/10.1016/j.simpa.2019.100012
• Global Sensitiviy Analysis:
  • paper describing GSA as implemented in the AB: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13194
  • additional description on our Wiki: https://github.com/LCA-ActivityBrowser/activity-browser/wiki/Global-Sensitivity-Analysis
• Modular LCA:
  • paper on modular LCA using the Activity Browser: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-015-1015-3
  • documentation modular LCA: http://activity-browser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
  • re-implementation of modular LCA into the AB is ongoing, see here: https://github.com/marc-vdm/activity-browser/tree/mLCA

Brightway2:

• https://brightway.dev/