In recent years integrated processes have attracted considerable attention in both academic research and industrial applications. The integration, for instance of reaction and separation, reduces the degrees of freedom and requires tight control to operate the processes at optimal conditions. From the available number of measurements and input variables, a control structure has to be identified which guarantees the best performance. In this paper, we discuss the application of a systematic control structure selection consisting of pre-screening of structures and calculation of the attainable performance for the heterogenous catalyzed esterification of methyl acetate in a batch reactive distillation column. The approach is applied to a linearized model of 85th order of the nonlinear system. To verify the predictions of the control structure selection method, linear controllers are designed for the favorable structures by using a frequency response approximation method. The resulting linear controller is applied to the nonlinear model and shows good performance.