A quantitative structure property relationship (QSPR) model for prediction of standard net heat of combustion was developed from molecular structures. A diverse set of 1650 organic compounds were employed as the studied dataset, and a total of 1481 molecular descriptors were calculated for each compound. The novel variable selection method of ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm coupled with the partial least square (PLS) was employed to select optimal subset of descriptors that have significant contribution to the overall property of standard net heat of combustion from the large pool of calculated descriptors. As a result, four molecular descriptors were screened out as the input parameters, and a four-variable multi-linear model was finally constructed using multi-linear regression (MLR) method. The resulted squared correlation coefficient R-2 of the model was 0.995 for the training set of 1322 compounds, and 0.996 for the external test set of 328 compounds, respectively. The results showed that an accurate prediction model for the net heat of combustion could be obtained by using the ant colony optimization method. Moreover, this study can provide a new way for predicting the net heat of combustion of organic compounds for engineering based on only their molecular structures. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.