AbstractThis paper is concerned with an important aspect of process control design—synthesis of the control structure. Synthesis of control structures has long been practiced by experienced control engineers, who relied on intuition, insight and judgment to pick a feasible solution from the vast number of alternatives that were possible. This paper describes a systematic procedure to generate these alternatives based on the cause‐and‐effect representation of the process. The final product is a set of control schemes from which the final system may be selected or evolved. The work is significant in that it is the first attempt to apply non‐numerical problem‐solving techniques to the problem of synthesizing process control structures. As such, it gives a new way of studying and teaching chemical process control.