The forecasting and prediction of crude oil are necessary in enabling governments to compile their economic plans. Artificial neural networks (ANN) have been widely used in different forecasting and prediction applications, including in the oil industry. The dendritic neural regression (DNR) model is an ANNs that has showed promising performance in time-series prediction. The DNR has the capability to deal with the nonlinear characteristics of historical data for time-series forecasting applications. However, it faces certain limitations in training and configuring its parameters. To this end, we utilized the power of metaheuristic optimization algorithms to boost the training process and optimize its parameters. A comprehensive evaluation is presented in this study with six MH optimization algorithms used for this purpose: whale optimization algorithm (WOA), particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO), genetic algorithm (GA), sine–cosine algorithm (SCA), differential evolution (DE), and harmony search algorithm (HS). We used oil-production datasets for historical records of crude oil production from seven real-world oilfields (from Tahe oilfields, in China), provided by a local partner. Extensive evaluation experiments were carried out using several performance measures to study the validity of the DNR with MH optimization methods in time-series applications. The findings of this study have confirmed the applicability of MH with DNR. The applications of MH methods improved the performance of the original DNR. We also concluded that the PSO and WOA achieved the best performance compared with other methods.