Our ultimate aim is to develop a general methodology for assigning feasible separation schemes of multicomponent azeotropic distillation A framework is presented for creating feasible distillation schemes which is the first part of the design procedure. The proposed methodology is demonstrated on a four-component mixture with six binary and three ternary azeotropes. The main difficulty in extending the method is the impossibility of the visualisation of the separating sets and the distillation region in higher dimensions. The application of the algebraic topology will provide the means for constructing the distillation boundary structures in systems of more than four components.