Welding distortion is a current issue in many industrial parts, especially for heavy industry such as shipbuilding, plant industry. The welding process has many processing parameters influencing welding angular distortion such as heat input power, welding speed, gas flow rate, plate thickness and the welded material properties, etc. In this work, the conventional local minimization concept was applied to find a set of optimum welding process parameters, consisted of welding speed, plate thickness and heat input, for a minimum angular distortion. An analytic solution for welding angular distortion, which is based on laminated plate theory, was also applied to investigate and optimize the welding process parameters. The optimized process parameters and the angular distortion for various parametric conditions could be easily found by using the local minimum concept.