Wolff and Skogestad (1994) review previous work on plantwide control with emphasis on the process-oriented decomposition approaches. They suggest that plantwide control system design should start with a “top-down” selection of controlled and manipulated variables, and proceed with a “bottom-up” design of the control system. At the end of the paper ten heuristic guidelines for plantwide control are listed.
There exists other more or less heuristics rules for process control; e.g. see Hougen and Brockmeier (1969) and Seborg et al. (1995).