Autoreferencing a product system

Question

Hello,

I am trying to create a product system with a process having natural gas as input. The main exchange of the product system is natural gas. As I need to count the upstream impacts, I have to considere that the natural gas comes from the same product system. Thus, the provider for the natural gas is the same product system. Nonetheless, OpenLCA does not allow to set the product system as a provider.

How I can create this loop? Should I create a dummy process?

Answer 1

The product system hierarchy assumes a tree-structure, i.e. no circular, closed loops across product systems, to make calculation easier. That means that a self-referencing of a product system is not supported. Normally though this is not such a limitation, as loops within processes in one product system are of course supported.