Rapid response to remove (or reduce) the detrimental effects of accidents has always been an important safety issue for the chemical industries. A systematic strategy is presented in this paper to synthesize emergency response procedures in any given batch system. Specifically, two distinct sets of automata are first constructed offline to model the plant behaviors and the control specifications, respectively. On the basis of these automata, an admissible supervisor can be synthesized online for a diagnosed failure-induced system state by applying the parallel composition operation. For the purpose of identifying an efficient operating procedure to steer the system away from hazardous conditions while still maintaining an acceptable production rate, an additional set of auxiliary automata can be augmented with this supervisor to set the operation targets and to limit the total number of actuator actions. Two examples are presented in this paper to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.