The escalating interest in utilizing non-competitive feedstocks for biodiesel production suggests waste cooking oil as a cost-effective resource being explored.The present work highlights the bioconversion of waste cooking oil catalyzed by heterogeneous ZnO nano-catalyst derived from Aloe vera.The performance of DI-CI engine was analyzed for the biodiesel blends of B20 & B20GS50 with externally cooled electronically controlled EGR.The green synthesized zinc oxide nano particle acts as a dual performer including transesterification catalyst and fuel additive.The results revealed that nano catalyzed biodiesel potential of waste cooking oil was 92 ± 0.24 %.The kinetic modeling demonstrated first order reaction kinetics with k = 0.015 min-1 and thermodn. anal. evidenced endothermic nature of transesterification with ΔH = 39.74 kJ/mol.UV-Vis spectra confirm the presence of zinc oxide nanoparticles at 564 cm-1.FTIR anal. exhibited peaks at 2928, 1442, 3428 and 1750 cm-1 indicate alkane (CH2), C=O, hydroxyl and amino functional moieties resp.The sharp peak indicates good crystallinity of the nanoparticles in XRD anal.Machine learning tools such as RSM and ANN demonstrated lesser RMSE and R2 values of 0.1555, 0.2276, 20.33 and 83.54 for BTE and NOx resp.The higher R2 value of RSM such as 0.9891 and 0.9999 corresponding to BTE and NOx indicates the reliability of the model towards performance optimization.RSM predicted optimized parameters are 100 % load, 81.564 % biodiesel and 20 % EGR resulted with 31.259 % BTE and 169.2 ppm NOx.The predictive ability of RSM was higher than ANN.Therefore, the study recommended RSM for performance optimization of DI-CI engine.