Abstract: A scheduling method based on genetic algorithm is presented in this paper for the automated production cell without intermediate buffer. In order to ensure the satisfaction of the generated scheduling strategy to the required constraints, the penalty items are involved in the fitness computation procedure to avoid the search process from converging to the infeasible solution. The method presented in this paper can geta feasible scheduling strategy as well as enable the system achieve good performance, and this is proved by simulation result for a cell sample.