Western Canada has large reserves of heavy crude oil and bitumen. The Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) process that couples a steam-based in situ recovery method with horizontal well technology, has emerged as an economic and efficient way to produce the shallow heavy oil reservoirs in Western! Canada. Numerical reservoir simulation is used to predict reservoir performance. However, prior to the prediction phase, integration of production data into the reservoir model by means of history matching is the key stage in the numerical simulation workflow. Research and development of efficient history matching techniques for the SAGD process is important. An automated technique to assist in the history matching phase of the SAGD process is implemented and tested. The developed technique is based on a global optimization method known as. Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA). This technique is easy to implement, robust with respect to non-optimal solutions, can be easily parallelized and has shown an excellent performance for the solution of complex optimization problems in different fields of science and engineering. The reservoir parameters are estimated at reservoir scale by solving an: inverse problem. At each iteration, selected reservoir parameters are adjusted. Then, a commercial thermal reservoir simulator is I used to evaluate the impact of these new parameters on the field I production data. Finally, after comparing the simulated production curves to the field data, a decision is made to keep or reject the altered parameters tested. This research is preliminary. Although the results are not ready for commercial implementation, the ideas and results presented here should prove interesting and fuel development in this important subject area. A Matlab((1)) code, coupled with a reservoir simulator, is implemented to use the SPSA technique to study the optimization of; a SAGD process. A synthetic case that considers average reservoir and fluid properties present in Alberta heavy oil reservoirs' is presented to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the technique.