Real diesel fuels are mixtures composed of hundreds to thousands of components; thus, developing surrogate fuels composed of a few representative hydrocarbon components is essential for multidimensional computational fluid dynamics spray combustion simulation purposes. Surrogates that can characterize the thermophysical properties and evaporation processes of real fuel are the "physical" surrogates. Surrogates that are able to mimic fuel chemical-kinetics-related properties are viewed as the "chemical" surrogate models. For spray combustion modeling, fuels experience thermophysical (heating and evaporation) and chemical kinetics (ignition and combustion) processes. To model the multiphase spray combustion process, a "unified" diesel surrogate, which can emulate both the physical and chemical (kinetics) properties of the real diesel fuel, is proposed in this study. A group of hydrocarbon species was selected, using an inversed batch distillation methodology, to match the experimental distillation curve of standard diesel blends. For the chemical kinetics target, a detailed reaction mechanism of 352 species with 13 264 reactions was used for gas-phase ignition delay time predictions and a reduced reaction mechanism of 200 species with 6907 reactions was used for laminar flame speed simulations. On the basis of the hydrocarbon class concentrations of typical diesel fuels of normal/isoalkanes, cycloalkanes and aromatics, this study identified the four-componet surrogate fuel for diesel fuel as 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene (C9H12), trans-decalin (C10H18), heptamethylnonane (iC(16)H(34)), and n-hexadecane (C16H34) with mole fraction 0.262:0.065:0.365:0.308. Important thermophysical and chemical targets, including molecular weight, lower heating value, cetane number, hydrogen/carbon mass ratio, density, kinematic viscosity, surface tension, and specific heat, are also predicted using this surrogate. In addition, chemical kinetics characteristics, including ignition delay times as well as laminar flame speeds, are used to validate the proposed surrogate fuel.