Aircraft Final Assembly Line Balancing and Workload Smoothing: A Methodological Analysis

Assembly Line Balancing (ALB) comprises ordering of tasks among workstations to satisfy precedence constraints and objective functions. Due to the specific features of an aircraft, such approach is not fully suitable for the case of an aircraft Final Assembly Line (FAL). Where, the number of workstations relates to technological criteria rather than to a calculation aiming to minimize a specific parameter. Workload smoothing is addressed once the FAL configuration is defined. To improve current practices, a methodological approach was taken to address the conceptual modeling of an aircraft assembly line.