Develop your own Wizards

Users of a SimaPro Developer version can develop their own Wizards. This opens up possibilities to produce an interactive tool for non-LCA experts.

The Wizard is an interface between the user and the tool. The user enters data on the product and the life cycle, and the Wizard translates this into consistent LCA results.

Try the LCA Wizard in the SimaPro demo to see how powerful it is!

Wizards can have many applications:

• An interactive alternative to writing LCA reports. A user can now recalculate results using different assumptions, or change the product specifications. Developing a Wizard does not take more time than writing an LCA report.
• A powerful tool for industry associations that want to provide a flexible but easy to use software for a group of companies. Such solutions have now been developed for FEFCO (www.fefco.org), the Dutch Concrete industry, and the European Car tyre industries.

Wizard development

The language needed to develop wizards is easy to learn (although you need a thorough understanding of SimaPro). Writing wizards is based on the concept of using “nodes”. Each node contains a series of instructions for SimaPro. A series of nodes form a Wizard. Wizards can also branch, which means you can reuse certain parts to avoid double work.