Crude oil distillation is important in refining industry. Operating variables of distillation process have a critical effect on product output value and energy consumption. However, the objectives of minimum energy consumption and maximum product output value do not coordinate with each other and do not lead to the maximum economic benefit of a refinery. In this paper, a systematic optimization approach is proposed for the maximum annual economic benefit of an existing crude oil distillation system, considering product output value and energy consumption simultaneously. A shortcut model in Aspen Plus is used to describe the crude oil distillation and the pinch analysis is adopted to identify the target of energy recovery. The optimization is a nonlinear programming problem and solved by stochastic algorithm of particle warm optimization. (C) 2015 The Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China, and Chemical Industry Press. All rights reserved.