The purpose of this study is to establish the optimum line heating condition to straighten the excessive bending distortion of a thin plate welded structure. For it, the extensive FEA and experiments were performed to evaluate the effect of heat source, heating speed and position on the straightening of a thin plate welded structure. In accordance with the results obtained by FEA and experiments, the straightening effect of line heating was strongly depends on the variables used in this study. With the results, the optimum line heating condition was established by using the response surface method and verified through comparing it with the numerical analysis result.