In order to control product compositions in a multicomponent distillation column, the distillate and bottom compositions are estimated from on-line measured process variables. In this paper, inferential models for estimating product compositions are constructed using dynamic Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression, on the basis of simulated time series data. II is found that the use of past measurements is effective for improving the accuracy of the estimation. The influence of selection of measurements and sampling intervals on the performance is also investigated. From the detailed dynamic simulation results, it is found that the cascade control system based on the proposed dynamic PLS model works much better than the usual tray temperature control system. (C) 2000 IFAC.