Chemical industry area-wide layout design is a significant section for enterprises management. Its main aim is to improve production efficiency and operational safety. At current stage, relative location of plants in an industrial area is determined by expertise based on material flow for shortening material transportation distance. However, few systematic methodology has been proposed to guide the material flow based area-wide layout design. Moreover, heat flow, such as steam, is often ignored in area-wide layout design, leading to a longer piping of heat and a higher energy loss. In this paper, a systematical area-wide layout design methodology is proposed considering both material flow piping and steam piping. A genetic algorithm based methodology is proposed to optimize the area-wide layout according to piping implementation. Different from one-to-one connection for material piping, steam piping configuration is an optimization with multi-branches pipe network and the calculation is difficult. To solve the problem, improved Kruskal algorithm is used in proposed method. In addition, some safety and environmental issues are considered in the model. A case study consisting of three scenarios is constructed to prove the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. (C) 2016 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.