Despite the existence of advanced controllers for jacketed tubular reactors, generic optimal steady-state reference temperature profiles are rather scarce. In this paper, optimal (infinite dimensional) temperature profiles are derived by exploiting a combination of analytical and numerical optimal control techniques for two cost criteria which both involve a trade-off between a conversion and an energy cost. Hereby, the following results are obtained: (i) a more complex model which also incorporates heat transfer, yields more valuable references than a simple model which only takes the reaction into account, (ii) the analytical approach allows to extract generic features in the reference profiles, enhancing the robustness against model mismatch, and (iii) the performance loss due to practical implementation hardware, i.e., the availability of only a finite number of isothermal jacket elements, is quantified. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.