Building an appropriate mathematical model that describes the system behaviour with a certain degree of satisfaction is quite challenging owing to the uncertain and volatile nature of thermodynamic constants and geometric parameters. In this paper, we present a technique to approximate and validate the dynamic behaviour of the Aström–Bell boiler‐turbine power plant based on an RBFNN over a large operating range. The proposed RBFNN is applied to solve the parametric identification problem for nonlinear and complex systems using an optimiser based on a hybrid genetic algorithm. This optimiser is composed of the gradient descent optimiser and a genetic algorithm for fast convergence. Two simulations were performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed technique under different situations with several boiler‐turbine input variables. The optimal structure and parameters of the obtained RBFNN‐based model emulates well the dynamic behaviour of the Aström–Bell boiler‐turbine system. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.