In just-in-time production systems, U-shaped production lines rather than traditional straight lines are often adopted since they have some advantages. The advantages of U-lines over straight lines are that the workstations required can be reduced and the necessary number of workers can be easily adjusted when the demand rates are changed. In this paper, we present a new genetic algorithm(GA) to minimize the number of workstations primarily and improve the work relatedness secondarily in the U-line production systems. Also, a new heuristic method is presented according to the work related factors and characteristics of U-line balancing. Some major aspects of the proposed GA are discussed, with emphasis on representation, decoding and evaluation function. Extensive experiments are carried out on well-known test-bed problems in the literature to verify the performance of our algorithm . The computational results show that our algorithm is a promising alternative to existing heuristics.