Direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) process technique is one of the widely used additive manufacturing (AM) method. Some of the challenges in this process are minimizing residual stress and part distortions due to the high thermal gradient during printing. Using an adequate amount of support structures will reduce part distortion but over usage of supports results in increased cost, time and support removal effort. In this study, an attempt is made to optimize support structure required to build part successfully, using finite element analysis (FEA)-based numerical optimization scheme. The problem is formulated to minimize the volume fraction (VF) of the support structure while maintaining support yield strength, and printed part distortion as constraints. Homogenization of perforated block support structure into simple solid continuum technique is adopted in this study to reduce model complexity and reduction of computational cost associated with distortion prediction in FEA. A cantilever beam test sample is printed in Inconel 718 material using an EOS M280™ machine to demonstrate the efficacy of this approach. The optimization result of volume fraction is used as a support generation parameter to create actual support geometry and is verified using FEA. Distortion simulation shows good agreement with optimization results. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.