Parameter estimation for vapor-liquid equilibrium (VLE) data modeling plays an important role in design, optimization and control of separation units. This optimization problem is very challenging due to the high non-linearity of thermodynamic models. Recently, several stochastic optimization methods such as Differential Evolution with Tabu List (DETL) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) have evolved as alternative and reliable strategies for solving global optimization problems including parameter estimation in thermodynamic models. However, these methods have not been applied and compared with respect to other stochastic strategies such as Simulated Annealing (SA), Differential Evolution (DE) and Genetic Algorithm (CA) in the context of parameter estimation for VLE data modeling. Therefore, in this study several stochastic optimization methods are applied to solve parameter estimation problems for VILE modeling using both the classical least squares and maximum likelihood approaches. Specifically, we have tested and compared the reliability and efficiency of SA, GA, DE, DETL and PSO for modeling several binary VILE data using local composition models. These methods were also tested on benchmark problems for global optimization. Our results show that the effectiveness of these stochastic methods varies significantly between the different tested problems and also depends on the stopping criterion especially for SA, CA and PSO. Overall, DE and DETL have better performance for solving the parameter estimation problems in VLE data modeling. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.