BIM-based description of wastewater treatment plants

Building information modeling (BIM) advances the efficiency of planning, construction, and operation of buildings. A prerequisite for life cycle use of building information is a standardized data format. The Industry... [ view full abstract ]

Building information modeling (BIM) advances the efficiency of planning, construction, and operation of buildings. A prerequisite for life cycle use of building information is a standardized data format. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), a standard approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), are a data format proposed to describe building information models and to provide interoperability between BIM software packages. Although the IFC enable digital descriptions of information relevant to large parts of the construction industry (such as buildings and infrastructure), wastewater treatment plants are not sufficiently supported by the IFC. This paper presents a semantic data model for describing wastewater treatment plants and provides a conceptual framework for implementing the semantic data model into the IFC schema. The semantic data model, which has been developed following German standards for wastewater infrastructure, focuses on specific classes and attributes necessary for planning wastewater treatment plants. The semantic data model proposed in this study serves as a basis for domain-specific extensions of the IFC schema with entities relevant to describing wastewater treatment plants, enabling BIM-based collaborative planning and reliable information exchange of wastewater treatment plants.