Abstract: The barge is a common transportation widely adopted for launching large marine structures in the ship industry.Barge＇s stowage planning is conducted mainly depending on the adjustment of floating conditions in accor dance with the hydrostatic balance principium and basic knowledge of ships.In order to complete stowage process in a short time,this paper applies an improved Genetic Algorithm(GA) to optimize ballast water＇s distri ibution,which propose improved approaches such as all-cross and distributed dynamic penalty function.The results show that stowage planning using improved GA is better than the basic planning in terms of time and effic iency.Improved GA to optimize barge＇s stowage can meet the engineering requirements and is time-saving for loading onboard the barge.