The push towards sustainable operation has pressurized the batch process industries to implement energy minimization. One technique proven in the continuous industries is heat integration-matching the hot streams that require cooling and the cold streams that require heating to reduce the overall utilities consumption. In this work, we present a methodology for heat integration in multipurpose batch plants. This is done by optimizing the schedule to simultaneously minimize an economic objective such as make-span and utilities. We illustrate the framework by solving a literature case study. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.