New realities of modular construction

Modular construction has both advantages and disadvantages. Advantages are safety, reduction of construction time and faster plant startup time, reduced labor cost, weather friendliness, increased quality and efficiency, simultaneous production capability, testing ease and fewer interruptions to an operating plant. Disadvantages are transportation costs, module size limitations, transportation-accessibility needs, increased engineering effort, and offloading and setting needs. These pros and cons were identified by a Construction Industry Institute (C2) task force established in 1989 to assess modular construction strengths and weaknesses. Objective: develop a decision-support tool to evaluate a project's suitability for modularization. The task force first had to learn what drivers influence modularization and then develop a set of characteristics of the ideal project for modularization. To help in this research, academics from the University of Houston and Purdue University developed MODEX, an expert system which became the decision-support tool. The paper first discusses the myths of modularization and then describes MODEX.