The waste heat from exhaust gases and cooling water of Homogeneous charge compression ignition engines (HCCI) are utilized to drive an ammonia-water cogeneration cycle (AWCC) and some heating processes, respectively. The AWCC is a combination of the Rankine cycle and an absorption refrigeration cycle. Considering the chemical kinetic calculations, a single zone combustion model is developed to simulate the natural gas fueled HCCI engine. Also, the performance of AWCC is simulated using the Engineering Equation Solver software (EES). Through combining these two codes, a detailed thermodynamic analysis is performed for the proposed tri-generation system and the effects of some main parameters on the performances of both the AWCC and the tri-generation system are investigated in detail. The cycle performance is then optimized for the fuel energy saving ratio (FESR). The enhancement in the FESR could be up to 28.56%. Under optimized condition, the second law efficiency of proposed system is 5.19% higher than that of the HCCI engine while the reduction in CO2 emission is 4.067% as compared with the conventional separate thermodynamic systems. Moreover, the results indicate that the engine, in the tri-generation system and the absorber, in the bottoming cycle has the most contribution in exergy destruction. Crown Copyright (C) 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.