Complex process plants increasingly appear in modern chemical industry. The wide use of material recycles and heat integration (with recycle and bypass streams) profoundly alters plantwide process dynamics and further increases their complexity. The interactions between process units may lead to poor performance of decentralized control systems. On the other hand, the complexity of plantwide systems prohibits the use of centralized controllers that reply on the complex model of the entire plantwide process. This paper addresses the plantwide chemical process control problem from a network perspective. The entire chemical plant is modeled as a network of process units linked by physical mass and energy flow and controlled by controllers that communicate with each other (i.e., distributed controllers). A two-port linear time-invariant representation is proposed to describe the dynamics of each process unit and its corresponding distributed controller. A two-step plantwide linear control design approach is developed. By using the dissipativity theory, the plantwide stability and control performance is translated into the closed-loop dissipativity condition that each distributed controller has to achieve. This allows the distributed controllers to be designed independently and to operate autonomously. The proposed approach is illustrated by a case study of a process network that consists of a reactor and a distillation column. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.