To reach the carbon neutrality and sustainable development goals, there is a need for robust tools to help decision-making in identifying the solutions presenting the minimal environmental impact.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the most efficient approach for estimating the environmental impact of products and services. It takes a lifecycle perspective, covers a broad range of environmental issues, is quantitative and is based on science.

LCA requires interdisciplinary knowledge coming from ecology, energy, material, complicated manufacturing and recycling processes, supply chains, etc. Consequently, a large amount of data necessary for LCA is distributed among heterogenous sources (reference data bases, product design, equipment manufacturer, material producer, process operator, etc) with no consistency between different data sources. So implementing LCA for manufacturing becomes a time consuming and error prone process. When observing LCA practices, we noticed a lack of efficient software methods and tools supporting the life cycle inventory phase of an LCA.

The LSEA offers a full-time research engineer position in the cross-cutting fields of knowledge engineering, semantic computing and Life Cycle Assessment to strengthen and diversify his team skills.

Your missions will consist of:

• Conducting a state of the art study on available ontologies and semantic computing approaches for LCA.
• Specifying all the requirements coming from the use cases of the project (batteries, additive manufacturing.
• Creating the ontologies necessary for the semantic annotation of the data gathered during the lifecycle inventory phase.
•  The semantic annotation of specific data from product passports of components inside an LCA.
• Creating the queries and rules that will encode the necessary reasoning features for consistency verification of sub-LCAs before combining them.
• Implementing tools supporting these methods for smart life cycle assessment.
• Promoting these assets through publications.

You will contribute to projects with academic and industrial partners of the LSEA, as well as be involved in French and European collaborative research projects, particularly in the fields of Life Cycle Assessment, knowledge engineering and semantic computing.

Successful candidates must hold a Master, or a PhD (or be near completion) in knowledge engineering, semantic computing, software engineering, computer science or a closely related topic. We are mainly looking for highly motivated applicants with:

• In-depth knowledge of ontologies development and semantic computing
• Knowledge of the principles and processes for Life Cycle Assessment.
• Self-learning and teamwork skills
• Background on AI and Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) will be considered as an advantage.
• Strong technical programming skills. Practical experience with rdf, owl, sparql, Protégé, Eclipse IDE.

Applications should include:

• Curriculum Vitae including background information, detailed work experience, list of publications.
• Motivation letter.
• Two recommendation letters.