Assembly lines constitute the main production paradigm of the contemporary manufacture industry. Thus, many optimization problems have been studied aiming to improve the efficacy of its use. In this work, the Fish School Search algorithm and a variation of it that incorporates a routine to avoid stagnation of the search process were applied in order to solve the Simple Assembly Line Balancing Problem - type 1. The results were compared with an exact solution procedure named SALOME and also with the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. Both proposed procedures were able to achieve good results and the stagnation avoidance routine incorporated to FSS allowed more uniform distributions of tasks among workstations in the assembly line and converged faster to optimal solutions.