This article presents a plantwide control structure design using dynamic performance-based optimization. The controlled and manipulated variable sets were obtained heuristically. The main plantwide control structures were established via dynamic optimization and the rest established via heuristic rules. The optimization problem was formulated as dynamic mixed integer nonlinear programming with objective function of measuring the control performance (ITAE of CVs) and the cost of manipulated variables (ITAE of MVs). The integer matrix in the formulation represents the plantwide control structure explicitly. The Tennessee Eastman (TE) process was selected to illustrate the proposed design procedure. The obtained control structures were evaluated via dynamic simulation in the face of various disturbances and set-point changing. The results were then compared with the control structure proposed by Luyben et al. (1999).