Off-Site Modular Construction (OSMC) research has been a growing research area over the past two decades because of low productivity in construction. Tools are superior in factories and productivity is much higher compared to a stick built site. This has spawned the development small, factory built, rapidly deployable and flexible process plants to take advantage of the gains in OSMC productivity. Chemical process plant research is studying fast, automated design and configuration.

In this paper, a literature review was performed on modular factory manufactured process plants. The literature review found that moving to small scale OSMC plant systems could enable cost and schedule savings and months of design time compared to the previous on-site assembly design. It was also found that while automation has been applied in earlier stages of the plant design process, a layout optimisation methodology has not been applied to small OSMC process plants.

The paper then proposes to utilise a mathematical layout optimisation model to help design and construct modular process plants and considers how this may fit into the process plant design process, as well as considering the transport requirements for modules.