SeqCarbon - Architecture

The system models the external environment and activities in a graph of items of various types that belong to the following segments:

• One “Entity” data item represents the organisation and “owns” all other items. The Entity has one or more Users who can log in to the SeqCarbon portal, query and manage items, register activities under that Entity.
• Entities have static data items like one or more Sites; Assets like Facilities, Vehicles or Equipment; farmers also have Parcels where they grow plants. Static items are managed by the Entity Users, the system does not follow their changes.
• The dynamic data items are bought, sold, used and created during the activity. A farm has StockMaterial items (sowing grains, chemicals, water, etc.) used on the Plantations where Products (both primary like 25 tons of wheat and secondary like 56 bales of straw) are created. These items are read-only for all Users, managed by Job items.
• Job items are created by Users in “Planned” state, at this point their data can be changed. General Jobs are like buy, sell, split, or merge; special ones are cultivation (apply StockMaterial items on a Parcel or Plantation), sowing, harvesting, drying, etc. Later a User executes the Job, giving the exact parameter values (used Vehicle and its fuel consumption, equipment like a sprayer and the amount of materials deployed, etc.) and the Job becomes “Done” and read-only.
• Along the Job execution, the type-specific algorithm both updates the related inventory and creates / updates the UsedResources data item assigned to the target item(s). The UsedResources item contains properly identified materials (Diesel fuel or Pesticide with a given product id), can be verified in a standard inventory review, does not depend on any external algorithm.
• The Split and Merge jobs are special because their goal is to change the Product and would make the audit process complicated. To avoid this problem, Split closes the source e.g. a Product of 25 tons of wheat and creates new ones of 10 and 15 tons. The collected UsedResources values are distributed among the new Products according to their ratio. Merge follows similar but opposite process. The result is that the Product item content does not change, it always represents a given amount and type; and is closed on split or merge.
• The final goal is Footprint calculation for any Product, that requires:
  • An objective list of properly identified resources of given amounts – that is available in the attached UsedResources collection.
  • Emission factors and calculation methods assigned to the identified resources. These factors come from various sources and may even change among regions or over time. The SeqCarbon system calls them “Protocols” and allows using multiple protocols at the same time.
• The Footprint item contains two segments, Scope3 and Total. Root Products like the wheat grown at a farm only has Total footprint calculated from its UsedResources, closed when a Sell job is executed on it. This Footprint becomes both the Scope3 and Total Footprint of the Product, the result of executing the related Buy Job at the buyer Entity. The Scope3 Footprint only changes on executing Split or Merge as described above and acts as the base for the Total Footprint calculation that increases it with the calculated emissions for the local UsedResource collection.

Home