Sustainable process design and energy efficiency evaluation are major topics for recent process engineering. Process integration by the means of heat recovery is a powerful approach to reduce the need for additional heating or cooling. Usually a heat exchanger network is applied to utilize waste heat within a process directly, while a super ordinated utility system is applied for indirect heat transfer between different processes. The aim of this work is to point out the possibilities of multi-objective optimisation in order to implement the design of heat recovery measures at an early stage of process design. Similar to the well-known pinch technology this new combined optimisation procedure can be best described as an advanced targeting step. Pareto-optimal solutions are generated using a genetic algorithm. The mathematical background will be described within this work.