A conventional reactive distillation column will not be able to produce high purity isopropyl acetate (IPAc) due to the existence of a minimum boiling azeotrope in the system. In this work, a novel reactive and extractive distillation (RED) process was proposed and used for the synthesis of IPAc. Results showed that the purity of IPAc reached 99.5%. Then, the RED flowsheet was optimized with minimum total annual cost (TAC), and a number of key variables were determined with the assistance of program written in Visual Basic 6.0 (VB). After that, two control structures of the RED process were developed: a basic control structure with temperature/proportional cascade control and an improved control structure with composition/temperature cascade control. The integral of squared error (ISE) was introduced to evaluate the performance of control systems, it revealed that the improved control structure had better controllability.