Crude oil distillation is an important process in petroleumrefining, where whole crude is separated into products eachwith a narrower boiling range. An associated heat exchangernetwork (HEN) recovers heat from the column to pre-heatthe crude oil. Together the columns and HEN comprise thecrude oil distillation system. Therefore, any operating orstructural change to the distillation column will have animpact on the heat recovery of the system (Gadalla et al.,2003a), making the retrofit of crude oil distillation systemsa complex problem with many degrees of freedom and con-straints.