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This document introduces the main concepts of Collaborative Engineering as a new methodology, procedures and tools to design and develop an aircraft, as Airbus Military is implementing. Airbus designs and industrializes aircrafts under Concurrent Engineering techniques since decades with success. The introduction of new PLM methodologies, procedures and tools, mainly in the industrialization areas, and the need to reduce time-to-market conducted Airbus Military to push the engineering teams to do things in a different way. Traditional Engineering works sequentially, Concurrent Engineering basically overlaps tasks between teams using maturity states and taking assuming risks. Collaborative Engineering promotes a single team to develop product, processes and resources from the conceptual phase to the start of the serial production. The deliverable of the team is an iDMU (industrial DMU), a complete definition and verification of the virtual manufacturing of the product.

The design of an aircraft Final Assembly Line (FAL) is part of the product industrialisation process. The FAL conceptual design phase is characterised by being time-consuming and depending heavily on personnel knowledge and experience. The need to develop methods and tools to enhance the design of aircraft assembly lines is acknowledged by academia and industry. This work proposes a knowledge-based prototype application to assist and guide designers in the definition and evaluation of conceptual FAL alternatives. A digital FAL is part of the industrial digital mock-up (iDMU) and comprises three structures: product, processes and resources (PPR). The implementation of the proposed application was carried out in a commercial software system supporting the PPR structures and the iDMU. The executed case studies show the feasibility of the proposed approach, which can be considered as a starting point contribution to the field.

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.

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