A large number of heat flows at various temperature and pressure levels exist in a polygeneration plant which co-produces electricity and chemical products. Integration of these external heat flows in a heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) has great potential to further enhance energy efficiency of such a plant; however, it is a challenging problem arising from the large design space of heat exchanger network. In this paper, a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model is developed for the design optimization of a HRSG with consideration of all alternative matches between the HRSG and external heat flows. This model is applied to four polygeneration cases with different HRSG types, and results indicate that the optimized heat network mainly depends on the HRSG type and the model specification. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.