Semicontinuous distillation is a new separation technology for distilling multicomponent mixtures. This process was designed using design methodologies with heuristic components that evolved over 20 years. However, the fundamental philosophy of these design methodologies, which involves guessing, checking and then using a black-box optimization procedure to find the values of the design variables to meet some performance criteria, has not changed. Mainly, to address the problem of having a heuristic simulation termination criterion in the black-box optimization phase, the single shooting method for semicontinuous distillation design was proposed in this study. We envision that this is a first step in the transformation of the semicontinuous distillation design process for obtaining optimal designs. We demonstrate the application of this method using two case studies, which involve the separation of hexane, heptane and octane. (C) 2020 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.