Abstract During the conceptual design phase of an aerospace assembly line, the Design Solutions that will meet the functional and industrial requirements are defined. As a result it is possible to define an early conceptual design of the assembly line and its basic parameters. Assembly Line Balancing (ALB) comprises ordering of tasks among stations to satisfy precedence constraints. Due to the specific features of an aircraft, such approach is not fully suitable for the case of an aerospace assembly line where the number of stations relates to technological criteria rather than to a calculation aiming to minimize a specific parameter. This paper presents a preliminary ontology definition for aerospace assembly lines in the Airbus context using Model for Manufacturing (MfM) methodology. The authors implement a new approach to characterize mono configured aerospace products. This new approach lets maximum flexibility in the shopfloor implementing the adherence characteristic and is developed using a novel methodology, MfM. The new approach for modelling manufacturing systems has been coined as an extension of the previous authors’ research to introduce MBSE (Model Based Systems Engineering) concepts in manufacturing. A preliminary ontology based on MfM is developed and proposed to represent an aerospace assembly line using the innovative concept of adherence to assembly stations. The model scope is the configuration of the design solutions against manufacturing solutions, and the arrangement of them in a network of networks. The ontology definition is based on the DA08 artifact, used by authors in several researches, supporting the models currently in development and the next steps.