Ships and automobiles are fabricated from thin plates. To assemble parts, welding is commonly employed.However, welding distortion in large thin-plate panel structure is usually cased by buckling due to the residual stress. In this study, an elastic finite element method for predicting the welding distortion of three-dimensional thin-plate structures with considering welding sequence was proposed. In this method, the inherent strain was employed to model the local shrinkage due to welding itself, and the interface element was introduced to simulate the assembly process. The proposed method was applied to study the influence of welding sequence on the buckling distortion of the large thin-plate panel structure during assembly.