The accurate electrochemical model plays an important role in design and analysis of hydrogen fuel cell systems. For the purpose of estimating parameters of the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) model, and inspired by the foraging behavior of bacteria and bees, a hybrid artificial bee colony (HABC) algorithm is proposed. The HABC uses an improved solution search equation that mimics the chemotactic effect of bacteria to enhance the local search ability. To avoid premature convergence and improve search accuracy, the adaptive Boltzmann selection scheme is adopted, which adjusts selective probabilities in different stages. Performance testing has been conducted on some typical benchmark functions. The results demonstrate that the HABC outperforms other methods (BIPOA, PSOPS and two improved GAS) in both convergence speed and accuracy. The proposed approach is applied to estimate the PEMFC model parameters and the satisfactory model predictive curves are obtained. More experimental results in different search ranges and validate strategies indicate that HABC is an efficient technique for the parameter estimation problem of PEMFC. Copyright (C) 2013, Hydrogen Energy Publications, LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.