Patent Document ID: 7693725
Application ID: 11075626
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for determining equivalency factors comprising the steps of: selecting a plurality of first principle characteristics; selecting a target variable for the first principle characteristics, wherein the target variable is a metric for greenhouse gas emissions; selecting a set of first principle characteristics having more than a user-specified variation in the target variable; determining a set of developed characteristics; computing a set of equivalency factors from a plurality of selected set of first principle characteristics and the set of developed characteristics, wherein the set of equivalency factors is computed with an equation, {α j , j=1 to n}, using an optimization procedure, wherein n is the number of the selected first principle characteristics and the developed characteristics, and the optimization procedure is a linear optimization or nonlinear optimization executed by a computer processor to minimize a total error, {ε i , i=1 to m}, between a set of actual target variable values and a set of predicted target variable values, wherein m is a number of facilities, and the set of predicted target variable values is calculated by: TV i = ∑ j = 1 n ⁢ ⁢ α j * C ij + ɛ i , i = 1 , m , wherein C ij =the first principle characteristic or developed characteristic j of the i th facility; and outputting the set of equivalency factors onto a computer data medium.