Abstract. Inspired by observing fireworks explosion, a novel swarm intelligence algorithm, called Fireworks Algorithm (FA), is proposed for global optimization of complex functions. In the proposed FA, two types of explosion (search) processes are employed, and the mechanisms for keeping diversity of sparks are also well designed. In order to demonstrate the validation of the FA, a number of experiments were conducted on nine benchmark test functions to compare the FA with two variants of particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms, namely Standard PSO and Clonal PSO. It turns out from the results that the proposed FA clearly outperforms the two variants of the PSOs in both convergence speed and global solution accuracy.