The ultimate objective of this project is to design a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system that both monitors and controls one of the most important equipments in the oil and gas industry, which is the distillation column. Devising a system for monitoring and controlling distillation columns is not just very necessary; it also assures top notch performance of the equipment. The results and analysis are expected to be published as a series of papers. However, this paper deals with only the modeling and simulation of the control process of a binary methanol-water pilot plant. Special attention is given to the PI tuning techniques of Cohen-coon, Multi loop, Ziegler - Nichols and ITAE. ©2009 IEEE.