Some industrial steel structures are composed by components linked by several welding joints to constitute an assembly. The main interest of assembly simulation is to evaluate the global distortion of welded structure. The general method, thermo-elasto-plastic analysis, leads to excessive model size and computation time. In this study, a simplified method called "Local and Global approach" was developed to break down this limit and to provide a accurate solution for distortion. Local and global approach is composed of 3 steps; 1) Local simulation of each welding joint on a dedicated mesh (usually very fine due to high thermal gradients), taking into account for the non linearity of the material properties and the moving heat source. 2) Transfer to the global model of the effects of the welding joints by projection of the plastic strain tensors. 3) Elastic simulation to determine final distortions in global model. The welding deformation test for mock-up structure was performed to verify this approach. The predicted welding distortion by this approach had a good agreement with experiment results.