The mathematical abstraction of a physical process is essential in engineering problems, as it can often be impractical or impossible to perform experiments on the real system. Besides, mathematical models are more flexible than physical prototypes, allowing for quick refinement of system designs to optimize various performance measures. The applications of the models can be divided into four parts, namely: design, estimation, control and monitoring. Some specific applications are i) simulations, ii) soft sensors, iii) performance evaluation, iv) statistical quality control and, v) fault detection and diagnosis. This work aims to: i) develop different classes of models capable of accurately simulating the output variable of a system, ii) evaluate the efficiency of optimization algorithms used in the parameter estimation task, iii) assess which friction model is the most appropriate to describe this phenomenon in a positioning system. The results showed that the friction in the positioning system presents a nonlinear and asymmetric behavior since some terms of the friction models related to the positive and negative velocities are significantly different from each other. The final result of the optimization process that used a local search algorithm was highly dependent on the initial conditions and the number of estimated parameters, which increased the simulation error. However, better estimates of the output variable were achieved when this approach was combined with other models of different classes. Through this last approach, the relative error was reduced by more than 20 percent. The simulations performed with the parameters estimated by the evolutionary algorithms were more accurate, they were able to reduce the relative error by almost 30 percent when compared with the local search algorithm. Considering the second case study, the decision tree-based optimizer proved to be equally effective compared to evolutionary algorithms. The relative error of the simulations using the parameters estimated by these algorithms was less than 8 percent. Besides, the shape of the friction reconstructed in the second joint of the robotic manipulator through the parameters estimated by the algorithms is in accordance with the expected.