Presented in this paper is a mathematical technique for simultaneous heat integration and process scheduling in multipurpose batch plants. Taking advantage of the intermittent continuous behavior of process streams during transfer from one processing unit to another, as determined by the recipe, the presented formulation aims to maximize the coincidence of availability of hot and cold stream pairs with feasible temperature driving forces, while taking into consideration process scheduling constraints. Contrary to similar contributions in published literature, time is treated as one of the key optimization variables instead of a parameter fixed a priori. Heat integration during stream transfer has the added benefit of shortened processing time, which invariably improves throughput, as more batches are likely to be processed within a given time horizon, compared to conventional heating and cooling in situ. Application of the proposed model to a case study shows improvements of more than 30% in energy savings and up to 15% in product output. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.