Processing facilities, such as wastewater treatment plants or biogas plants, are complex engineering structures that convert input streams to output streams using physical, biological, or chemical processes. When planning, constructing, and operating processing facilities, a large number of experts are involved, typically collaborating by exchanging unstructured files or even physical hardcopies, rendering planning, constructing, and operating of processing facilities costly and error prone. A promising approach towards improving processing facilities planning, while reducing cost and errors, is based on building information modeling (BIM). Using standardized data exchange formats, such as the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), BIM supports digital planning of buildings. However, the IFC are currently incapable of describing information required for planning processing facilities, particularly information required for sizing of reactors, which is a crucial task in planning processing facilities. Advancing BIM-based planning of processing facilities, an IFC schema extension to support sizing of reactors is proposed in this paper. With the IFC schema extension, a semantic basis is provided to enable BIM-based sizing of reactors, as exemplarily illustrated by means of biogas plants.
