The use of cohesive zone models is an efficient way to treat the damage especially when the crack path is known a priori. It is the case in the modeling of delamination in composite laminates. However, the simulations using cohesive zone models are expensive in a computational point of view. When using implicit time integration or when solving static problems, the non‐linearity related to the cohesive model requires many iteration before reaching convergence. In explicit approaches, an important number of iterations are also needed because of the time step stability condition. In this article, a new approach based on a separated representation of the solution is proposed. The proper generalized decomposition is used to build the solution. This technique coupled with a cohesive zone model allows a significant reduction of the computational cost. The results approximated with the proper generalized decomposition are very close the ones obtained using the classical finite element approach. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.