The block assembly process takes more than half of the total shipbuilding processes. Therefore, it is very important to have a practically useful block assembly process planning system which can build plans of maximum efficiency with minimum man-hours required. However, the process plans are often not readily executable in the assembly shops due to severe imbalance of workloads. This problem arises because the process planning is done on block by block basis in current practice without paying any attention to the load distribution among the assembly shops. this paper presents the development of an automated hull block assembly process planning system which results in the most effective use of production resources and also produces plans that enable efficient time management. If the load balance of assembly shops is to be considered at the time of process planning, the task becomes complicated because of the increased computational complexity. To solve this problem, a new approach is adopted in this research in which the load balancing function and process planning function are iterated alternately providing to each other contexts for subsequent improvement. The result of case study with the data supplied from the shipyard shows that the system developed in this research is very effective and useful.