Manufacturing process modeling of Boeing 747 moving line concepts

There are thousands of jobs performed on the Queen of the Sky, the Boeing 747, final assembly line for each airplane. When the decision was made to implement a moving line for the final assembly of the 747 it was absolutely necessary to evaluate many aspects of these jobs. Discrete event simulation models were constructed to analyze numerous 747 final assembly moving line scenarios throughout several phases. These models not only presented a visual understanding of different concepts, but also provided quantitative analysis of suggested scenarios to the moving line team. The results presented highly optimized production flows and processes, reducing cost and flow time from the traditionally 24 days to the targeted possible 18 days. This work outlined some of the moving line concepts, modeling objectives, and simulation analysis. Utilizations of different assembly positions were yielded as the result of discrete simulation modeling of many bundled jobs and stands of the 747 final assembly operation.