Activated sludge models (ASMs) are often used in the simulation of the wastewater treatment process to evaluate whether the effluent quality parameters of a wastewater treatment plant meet the standards. The premise of successful simulation is to choose appropriate dynamic parameters for the model. A niche based adaptive invasive weed optimization (NAIWO) algorithm is proposed in this paper to find the appropriate kinetic parameters of activated sludge model 1 (ASM1). The niche idea is used to improve the possibility of convergence to the global optimal solution. In addition, the adaptive mechanism and periodic operator are introduced to improve the convergence speed and accuracy of the algorithm. Finally, NAIWO is used to optimize the parameters of ASM1. Comparison with other intelligent algorithms such as invasive weed optimization (IWO), genetic algorithm (GA), and bat algorithm (BA) showed the higher convergence accuracy and faster convergence speed of NAIWO. The results showed that the ASM1 model results agreed with measured data with smaller errors. © 2020 by the authors.