The purpose of this study is to propose a method to decide near optimal settings of the welding process parameters in friction welding of stainless steel (AISI 304) by using non conventional techniques and artificial neural network (ANN). The methods suggested in this study were used to determine the welding process parameters by which the desired tensile strength and minimized metal loss were obtained in friction welding. This study describes how to obtain near optimal welding conditions over a wide search space by conducting relatively a smaller number of experiments. The optimized values obtained through these evolutionary computational techniques were compared with experimental results. The strength and microstructural aspects of the processed joints were also analyzed to validate the optimization.