A procedure linking kinetic modeling of catalytic reactions to reactor modeling for different configurations is developed and applied to the catalytic dehydrogenation of ethylbenzene to styrene. The procedure is applied to four configurations, namely fixed bed with/without hydrogen selective membranes and bubbling fluidized beds with/without selective membranes. The kinetic data for the industrial catalyst are extracted from industrial fixed bed data using a rigorous heterogeneous model. The kinetic data for the three in-house prepared catalysts are obtained from the laboratory scale experiments using pseudo-homogeneous models. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.