Economic performance assessment of control systems is receiving increasing attention in both academia and industry. A relevant framework is proposed in Bauer and Craig (Bauer, M., Craig, I.K., 2008. Economic assessment of advanced process control - a survey and framework. journal of Process Control 18 (1), 2-18) based on a comprehensive survey of the methods for economic analysis of advanced process control systems. The framework provides a formal procedure for the economic assessment of control systems. A practically motivated simulation study is used to cast the economic performance assessment of a nonlinear model predictive controller and three single-loop PID controllers for a run-of-mine milling circuit into this framework. Performance functions of the milling circuit, which dynamically relate the circuit process variables to monetary values, are developed based on a survey study on milling circuits and an in-depth literature study. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.