This research aims at developing a discrete kinetic model of the hydrotreating process of a crude oil residue based on experiments. Thus, various experiments were conducted in a continuous flow trickle bed reactor over a temperature range of 653-693 K, liquid hourly space velocity of 0.3-1.0 h -1 , and hydrogen pressure of 6.0-10.0 MPas at a constant hydrogen to oil ratio of 1000 L L -1 . The reduced crude residue had been assumed to have five lumps: naphtha, kerosene, light gas oil, heavy gas oil and vacuum residue. An optimization technique based on the minimization of the sum of the squared error between the experimental and predicted compositions of the distillate fractions was used to calculate the optimal value of kinetic parameters. The predicted product composition showed good agreement with the experimental data for a wide range of operating conditions with a sum of square errors of less than 5 %.