The fully thermally coupled distillation column for four components mixture separation is shown to be energy efficient compared to conventional distillation column sequence. However, it has not been implemented in practice as the form of four-product dividing wall column (FPDWC) because inherent three pairs of vapor and liquid splits increase the complexity and operation difficulty of this equipment. Thus it is necessary to reduce the vapor and liquid split number in order to promote its industrial application. In the present work, three heuristics were proposed to simplify the internal structure of FPDWC, which could be used separately or simultaneously. In order to provide a criterion for energy requirement comparison, minimum vapor flow diagram (V-min) was employed and shown to be an effective tool to analyze the feasibility of each simplified configuration. Compared to the complex Petlyuk arrangement, these derived practical configurations use less partition walls without energy penalty. To summarize, a flowchart was developed to synthesize configuration with least design and operation effort by employing the proposed heuristics. Two industrial mixtures were taken as examples to validate its effectiveness. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Institution of Chemical Engineers.