In this paper, an optimization via simulation heuristic algorithm has been developed to address the so-called Simple and U-shaped Assembly Line Balancing Problems which are type I. The proposed heuristic algorithm integrates mathematical programming and simulation techniques to solve the NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem by using the optimum solutions of the corresponding relaxed model into the simulation model as empirical distributions. These empirical distributions are the key factors to make the simulation model efficient in order to find the near optimum solutions which is the main contribution of the paper. Several computational experiments were carried out to test the performance of the proposed algorithm based on a set of benchmark test problems taken from the literature. As the results show, the proposed algorithm has good efficiency in terms of solutions quality and algorithm speed to be used in real world applications.

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