A number of production control concepts for the discrete manufacturing and assembly industries have been developed and also extended to the chemical process industries. However some of the basic aspects of batch processes are not adequately handled by standard commercial software. In this work a summary is made of industrial requirements. Then, we focus in the underlying philosophy of our present solution approach. Three main areas of improvement in the management of batch processes are described : realistic and detailed representation of plant operations, appropriate decision-making structures allowing for the design, analysis, validation and scheduling, monitoring and control of plant operation strategies, and process integration concepts. An illustrative example will be used to show the progress made and future direction of our work is indicated.