Aircraft tie-downs have been widely used to secure airplanes, helicopters, and other transportation vehicles to a ship's deck. A multi-pass welding process is typically used for integrating tie-downs to the deck plate to develop the required strength at the joint. During and after welding, the surrounding deck material around the tie-downs must deform elastically to preserve dimensional continuity, creating residual stresses. Weld-induced residual stress is amajor concern because the tie-downs are subject to cyclic, dynamic loading which could induce cracking and directly impact the fatigue life of the deck plate structures during services. To select an optimized welding sequence that minimizes weld-induced residual stress in the welded joint, an integrated computational materials engineering approach was used to evaluate the effect of welding sequences on residual stress distributions. Various deck materials (including ABS Grade DH36 and HSLA-100 steel alloys) and welding sequences were investigated to identify the optimized welding sequence which reduced radial residual stress distribution, resulting in lower final deck plate distortion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]