Although concentration control (C-control) strategy has been shown to give effective and robust control performance for batch cooling and semi-batch antisolvent crystallizations in recent years, no research work was reported concerning the potential application of conventional C-control for the more challenging semi-batch pH-shift reactive crystallization that is common in the process industries. To this end, this paper presents detailed analysis to find out that it is not feasible to apply the C-control to semi-batch PH-shift reactive crystallization. To circumvent this problem, a variant of C-control strategy by incorporating the Just-in-Time Learning (JITL) method to cope with strong process nonlinearity inherent in the pH-shift reactive crystallization is developed in this paper. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the proposed design and a comparison with conventional optimal control is made. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.