Parameter estimation procedures are very important in the chemical engineering field for development of mathematical models, since design, optimization and advanced control of chemical processes depend on model parameter values obtained from experimental data. Model nonlinearity makes the estimation of parameter and the statistical analysis of parameter estimates more difficult and more challenging. In this work, it is shown that many of these difficulties can be overcome with the use of heuristic optimization methods, such as the particle swarm optimization (PSO) method. Parameter estimation problems are solved here with PSO and it is shown that the PSO method is efficient for both minimization and construction of the confidence region of parameter estimates. Moreover, it is shown that the elliptical approximation of confidence regions of nonlinear model parameters can be very poor sometimes and that more accurate likelihood confidence regions can be constructed with PSO, allowing for more reliable statistical analysis of the significance of parameter estimates. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.