Control configuration selection is the procedure of choosing the appropriate input and output pairs for the design of SISO (or block) controllers. This step is an important prerequisite for a successful industrial control strategy. In industrial practices it is often the case that the system, which is needed to be controlled, is either in the descriptor form or can be represented in the descriptor form. Singular systems and the differential algebraic equation (DAE) systems are among these systems. Descriptor systems appear in the variety of fields to describe the practical processes ranging from power systems, hydraulic systems to heat transfer, and chemical processes. The focus of this paper is on the problem of control configuration selection for multivariable descriptor systems. A gramian-based interaction measure for control configuration selection of such processes is described in this paper. The proposed MIMO interaction measure is the extension of its gramian-based analogous counterpart, which has been proposed for the input–output pairing as well as for the controller architecture selection of the processes with the standard state-space form. The main advantage of this interaction measure is that it can be used to propose a richer sparse or block diagonal controller structure. The interaction measure is used for control configuration selection of the linearized CSTR model with descriptor from.