MEANS: A software and database platform for multi-criteria assessment of agri-food systems

INRA, the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, has launched in 2012 the development of theMEANS platform, dedicated to the multi-criteria sustainability assessment of agri-food systems. The mainobjectives of the platform are to facilitate multi-criteria assessments of farming and agri-food systems by INRAscientists and to assemble and share INRA research results: data describing agri-food systems and models tosupport multi-criteria sustainability assessment. At first, the MEANS platform is designed for environmentalassessment within the methodological framework of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).MEANS provides two complementary software programs, available on line (http://www.inra.fr/means):MEANS-InOut, an in-house developed tool, and a commercial LCA software program (Figure 1). The LCAsoftware allows calculating impact indicators for production systems which have been described in theMEANS-InOut software (description of production practices, technical design, system performances). MEANS-InOut and LCA software contain databases that are incremented by and shared among users. In future versions,MEANS-InOut will propose several models to calculate a given substance flow (agricultural pollutantemissions, inputs use). Thus MEANS-InOut will be a way to promote models developed by scientists.A first version of MEANS-InOut, operational for crop production has been released in November 2014. In thefull paper a case study of wheat production will be presented to illustrate the functionalities of the platform.Since 2014 INRA builds partnerships with ADEME and CIRAD in order to:•Speed up the development of MEANS-InOut software, for animal productions and process engineeringof agricultural products.•Extend the functionalities of MEANS, integrating new agri-food systems (ex: tropical productions),models and multi-criteria assessment methods developed by the partners (ex: the ADEMEAGRIBALYSE National project). •Expand the audience of the platform to animal production and food processing