AbstractThis paper introduces a four-rule heuristic method for production/assembly line balancing which seeks to minimize the number of workstations for a given cycle time. To evaluate its performance, the proposed method was compared with 15 other heuristic methods ranging in complexity from random assignment of work elements to Hoffmann's enumeration procedure. The results, based on both randomly generated problems and problems taken from the literature, indicate that the proposed heuristic outperformed other procedures. Further, the suggested method was able to find the optimal solution for 57 (85%) of the 67 literature problems.