In this work, the development and application of distributed economic model predictive control (DEMPC) methodologies to a catalytic reactor is considered. Specifically, two DEMPC methodologies are designed for sequential and iterative implementation, respectively. The DEMPC architectures are evaluated on the basis of the closed-loop performance and on-line computation time requirements compared to a centralized EMPC approach. For the catalytic reactor considered, DEMPC proves to be a viable option as it is able to give similar closed-loop performance while reducing the on-line computation time requirements relative to a centralized EMPC strategy.ii The thesis of Timothy Leif Anderson is approved.