A web-based portal for eco-improvement containing guidelines and environmental benefits estimator

This paper presents a web-based portal for eco-improvement, called I-Tree Guidelines Portal, containing a set of guidelines and an integration with an eco-assessment tool, called I-Tree Configurator, used for assessing the environmental criticalities of a product, to suggest how to improve it and to evaluate the achieved environmental benefits. The I-Tree Configurator automatically processes the manually entered data about the analyzed product and shows the most environmentally impactful entities, i.e., components, transports, consumptions, etc. These are used to automatically filter the guidelines contained within the I-Tree Guidelines Portal in order to propose to the user only the most suitable ones to solve the main problems. The guidelines are structured into different parts, according to well-known conceptual design frameworks, such as Function-Behaviour-Structure (FBS) methods and similar, and they aim to solve problems in inventive ways, by including the principles of TRIZ, widely reviewed and contextualized to environmental problems. The idea generated for each guideline is immediately evaluated by assessing their environmental impact saving on the considered items, through the same I-Tree Configurator, and ranked to provide a base for decision-making.