Managing Human Activities

When performing a lifecycle assessment, all the human activities that will happen all along the lifecycle of a product need to be collected. You can create human activities and assign them to entities such as products or parts.

A human activity is an action done by a human being impacting indicators like the environmental footprint.

This task shows you how to:

Assign Human Activities to Entities

You can assign a human activity to an entity such as products and specify factors like the degree of freedom (DoF). The impacts resulting of a human activity are taken into account during the metric computation.

  1. To apply a Human Activity to an entity, drag the Business Value Definition app from the Compass to your dashboard.
  2. Drag the entity in the Business Value Definition app.
  3. In the Human Activities tab , select Assign.
  4. Expand the Human Activity classification to the last node of the required category to select the Human Activity previously created, or search it by its name.
  5. Optional: To use an external value as a degree of freedom (DoF) on a product (absolute value or % of the value coming from the consolidation), do either of the following:
    1. Click to unlock and overload the value with an absolute value.

      As a result, a single product can have several human activities with different values of the metric as DoF.

    2. Assign which percentage of this metric value coming from the consolidation to use as DoF. For example, 70% of the metric of the product is made out of a certain material and 30% of another. The % can be over 100%.
    Notes:
    • If you lock the value again after having assigned an external DoF, you delete the external DoF and use the metric coming from consolidation.
    • At reload, if an external value has been attributed to the DoF, the value (% or absolute) is unlocked and displayed.
  6. In the Business Value Definition app, click to view human activities

Administrate Human Activities

You can create human activities having formulas associated to them and impacting metrics such as the environmental footprint.

  1. From the Compass, drag the Business Activities Definition app to your dashboard.
  2. In the Human Activity tab , select New Human Activity.
  3. Enter a name, the target phase(s) and the appropriate ISIC category by navigating the classification.

    The ISIC (International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities) is a United Nations industry classification system.

  4. Click Add New Entry to create the formula.
    1. Select the Target KPI from the list of available metrics.
    2. Select Kind for the formula.
    3. Specify your formula in the Formula field.

      Auto-completion suggestions are provided when you start entering content in the Formula box.

      The exact syntax of the patterns you want to use is displayed on the top right of the formula editor.

      If the entered formula is not valid or not in a format supported in the math parser library, the formula box becomes red, indicating there is an error.

    4. Define the Tolerance value.
    5. Define the Confidence value.
    6. Save the changes.
  5. Click on Create Activity to create the human activity.
  6. Wait for the index to run before assigning it.

Upgrade Assigned Human Activities

If you have a Human Activity with an ecoinvent version earlier than V3.8, a message appears helping you to upgrade the activity to the latest version.

To select a Human Activity, navigate in the ISIC.


  • When you click the message New version of this activity is available. Click here to upgrade., the latest version of the formulas is shown by default when declaring the characteristics for the activity.
  • When you click Edit , the formulas are upgraded to the latest version of the human activity.