A new method of designing multi-loop PID controllers is presented in this paper. By using the generalized IMC-PID method for multi-loop systems, the optimization problem involved in finding the PID parameters is efficiently simplified to find the optimum closed-loop time constant in a reduced search space. A weighted sum Mp criterion is proposed as a performance cost function to cope with both the performance and robustness of a multi-loop control system. Several illustrative examples are included to demonstrate the improved performance of the multi-loop PID controllers obtained by the proposed design method.