I have been studying the following simple case:

An aircraft assembly line is organized as a flow production process with a certain takt time. The total flow-time for assembly, painting and flight test is 25 days. The paint process takes 4-5 days, depending on the customer specific paint schema (due to cleaning, painting primers, base coating and customer livery and related drying times). The flight testing takes 7-8 days (depending on the weather conditions and issues that arise during testing). The delivery interval is 2 days. The assembly process starts with fuselage assembly in a fixed assembly tool and which takes 400 hours, to be performed by a of 10 people on average. The other assembly and test activities are much smaller and can be broken down in packages of 4 or 8 hours.

I would like to hear your opinions about the following questions:

  • How do you, in general, set up an assembly line in stations to optimally use all resources?
  • How many stations do you need in this specific case? Where do you perform the paint
    process in the flow?
  • What are the alternatives to plan the 400-hour fuselage assembly work package?

Thanks for your time