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The demand for air conditioning and cooling services is rapidly increasing worldwide. As cooling demand has high coincidence to occur in countries with high solar irradiation, the combination of solar thermal energy and cooling appears to be an exciting alternative to replace traditional electricity-driven cooling systems where electricity is generated from fossil fuels. Nevertheless, solar assisted cooling is not yet widely deployed because of many barriers amongst them the presumed high investment cost of solar cooling technology. This research aims at making this technology more affordable by providing a holistic optimization design of solar assisted district cooling systems. Toward this end, a mixed-integer linear programming model (MILP) is proposed that captures the key design and operation variables of a solar-assisted district cooling system. Hence, the proposed model aims at finding the optimal system …