Increasing economic challenges lead to the need for faster plant design in process industry. In this context, a promising approach is module-based plant design. Thereby, for the accomplishment of the required design tasks modules are selected from databases and configured instead of time-consuming and tailor-made plant design. Within this work, a general approach to module-based plant design is introduced and illustrated based on an example. To structure the design procedure different types of modules are defined for different design tasks: PFD, P&ID, Equipment and 3D Layout. Additionally, module selection can be performed at different Levels of Aggregation to cope with the high variance of applications. This enables module selection and configuration avoiding time-consuming, tailored modifications. Since modules are unmodifiable and project-independent, the module-based plant design approach presented is based on a consistent module definition. This work provides a framework to integrate some of the existing modularization approaches into a general module-based plant design approach. However, most often new approaches are necessary to accomplish the design tasks within the presented module-based plant design approach. Thus, this work also identifies open research gaps that need to be filled by future research. (C) 2018 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.