By addressing both flowsheeting and scheduling issues, a systematic approach is developed in this work to design batch azeotropic distillation processes for the homogeneous ternary and quaternary systems. The proposed design strategy is implemented sequentially in three stages. First, an integer program (IF) is formulated for producing the optimal structure of state-task network (STN). A nonlinear program (NLP) is then developed to generate the corresponding material-balance constraints. In the final step, a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model and a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model are constructed for stipulating the optimal short-term and cyclic schedules respectively. The conventional concept of event points is adopted to facilitate the continuous-time representation in these model formulations. The implementation procedure is illustrated with two example systems in this paper. Satisfactory process configurations and production schedules can both be produced in all the cases we have studied so far.