AbstractThe Flexible Job‐shop Scheduling Problem is an expansion of the traditional Job‐shop Scheduling Problem in which an operation can be processed by one or more machines. The purpose of this problem is to look for the smallest makespan. For that purpose, it is necessary to decide the optimal assignment of machines to operations and the order of operations on machines. In this paper, we focus on the maximum of the workloads for all machines and propose a new method of survival selection, a method of creation of the initial solution, mutation, and a method of escape to the genetic algorithm for this problem. The efficacy of our method is demonstrated by comparing its numerical experiment results with those of other methods. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 177(3): 28–35, 2011; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.21194