The objective of this study is to investigate the possibility of chemical process synthesis purely based on mathematical programming when given an objective, feed conditions, product specifications, and model equations for available process units. A method based on a state space approach is proposed, and applied to an example problem with a reactor, a heat exchanger, and a separator. The results indicate that a computer can automatically synthesize an optimal process without any heuristics or expertise in process design provided that global optimization techniques are improved to be suitable for large problems.