Membrane-assisted distillation (MAD) is a classic process-integration concept applied for an aqueous azeotrope dehydration. An engineer needs to decide what is the best balance point to trade-off the energy consumption of distillation and the capital cost of membrane module. The current study proposes a design methodology for optimizing the balance point of vapor permeation (VP) membrane-assisted distillation processes. As a generic case, thermodynamically non-ideal process of ethanol dehydration is used to obtain the design information that provides broad insights into the MAD operation. Furthermore, the proposed method provides a reasonable estimation of the concentration and pressure of the connection stream between membrane separation and distillation (which are the most important parameters in the VP-MAD integration process) based on the total annual cost (TAC) calculation in ACM (R). Successful application of the methodology is demonstrated for the dehydration of ethanol with different target product grades (99.6 wt% and 99.95 wt%) that need different hybrid configurations.