Figure 4 ANN model is proposed, developed and validated to predict residual stress (Fig. 4). It is feed forward back propagation network trained with Levenberg- Marquardt back propagation algorithm. The data required for training and testing the ANN model is obtained from finite element analysis simulation (Table 1). The learning function is gradient descent algorithm with momentum weight and bias learning function. The number of hidden layers and neurons are determined through a trial and error method, in order to accommodate the converged error. The structure of the proposed neural network is 4-12-13-1 (4 neurons in the input layer, 12 neurons in 1“ hidden layer and 13 neurons in 2™ hidden layer and 1 neuron in the output layer). With a learning rate of 0.55 and a momentum term of 0.9, the network is trained for 10000 iterations. The error between the desired and the actual outputs is less than 0.001 at the end of the training process and the command window shows the input test data and output obtained from the developed ANN model (Fig. 5). Fig. 3—Stress distribution over butt-welded structure under study