Research is our raw material
TerriFlux was born from public research — a spin-off from Inria — and still runs on it: nine R&D projects since 2022 with ADEME, INRAE, CNRS and Bpifrance feed directly into our tools and studies.
R&D projects
Every project pushes the same goal: making material and energy flow analysis rigorous, reproducible and accessible. A concrete example: in 2023, starting from about 1,200 data points collected "from field to plate" across ten French agri-food chains, our engines derived 19,000 computed flows, consistent and documented.
Socle
2024 — ongoing — ADEME
A shared territorial-modelling platform: one common framework to describe, reconcile and compare material and energy flows across territories.
BACCFIRE
2022 — 2025 — coord. ONF (French Forest Office)
Forest carbon and the wood value chain: generic flow schemas to track carbon from forests to wood products and their end of life.
RefFlux
2022 — 2023 — with 7 agricultural technical institutes
A common reference for flow diagrams of French agri-food supply chains, from field to plate — the source of several publications.
Woodyn
2025 — ongoing — coord. Université Gustave Eiffel
Territorial dynamics of urban wood: quantifying wood stocks and uses within cities.
MetabolHeat
2024 — ongoing — UMR 5600 EVS lab
Coupled modelling of the thermal and material metabolism of territories, with the Environnement Ville Société research lab.
Scalable
2022 — 2024 — coord. INRAE LESSEM
Scaling up a reference set of supply-chain coefficients: reproducible flow analyses for any French territory.
Real-Time
2022 — 2023 — French Tech Émergence grant
Real-time data reconciliation and fine multi-scale analysis — the algorithmic core that makes our computations interactive.
SankeySuite
2022 — ongoing — open source
Our product R&D: the OpenSankey editor, the OpenSankey+ SaaS suite and the MFAProblem reconciliation engine.
Scientific publications
Our methods are published and verifiable — all references are open access on HAL.
- Courtonne J.-Y., Alapetite J., Longaretti P.-Y., Dupré D., Prados E. (2015). Downscaling material flow analysis: The case of the cereal supply chain in France. Ecological Economics. [HAL]
- Courtonne J.-Y., Longaretti P.-Y., Alapetite J., Dupré D. (2016). Environmental Pressures Embodied in the French Cereals Supply Chain. Journal of Industrial Ecology. [HAL]
- Alapetite J., Courtonne J.-Y. et al. (2023). Introducing OpenSankey. [HAL]
- Levert F., Alapetite J. et al. (2024). Flow diagrams of French agricultural supply chains from field to plate: towards a common reference (in French). [HAL]
- Galibert A., Courtonne J.-Y., Alapetite J., Pannier A. et al. (2024). Socio-metabolic analysis of supply chains and their vulnerabilities (in French). [HAL]
- Diot V., Alapetite J. (2025). Quantitative assessment of the consumption of pork products in France in 2021. [HAL]
Partners & funders
We work daily with public research institutes and national agencies.
Have a research project or a study in mind? Get in touch.
The method, in video
Why material flow analysis and Sankey diagrams help steer sustainable supply chains — explained on the wood value chain.