The purpose of the present paper is to use artificial bee colony algorithm to speed up the nanopowders synthesis in the planetary mills. At first a direct relationship between the inverse of the milling time and the power of the planetary mill was established, which allows the validation of theoretical models proposed in the literature for the energy transfer in milling devices and the comparison of milling equipment efficiencies. Afterwards based on the obtained relation, eight design parameters in milling, namely, number of balls, ball diameter, vial radius, vial height, ball diameter distribution coefficient, plate spinning rate, vial spinning rate and distance between the center of the plate and the center of the vial were optimized. For evaluating the optimized parameters and their practical effectiveness, a case study was conducted. Result showed that by applying the optimal parameters instead of experimental (non-optimized) ones, a route with less time was obtained for the production of nanostructured powders in planetary mills. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.