This paper describes a robust support vector machines (SVMs) classification methodology, which can offer superior classification performance for important process engineering problems. The method incorporates efficient tuning procedures based on minimization of radius/margin and span bound for leave-one-out errors. An agent-based asynchronous teams (A-teams) software framework, which combines Genetic-Quasi-Newton algorithms for the optimization is highly successful in obtaining the optimal SVM hyper-parameters. The algorithm has been applied for classification of binary as well as multi-class real world problems. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.