The increasing technological demands of today call for complex systems, which in turn involve a series of optimization problems with some equality or inequality constraints. In this paper, we presents a real-coded genetic algorithm(RCGA) as an optimization tool which is implemented by three genetic operators based on real coding representation. Through a lot of simulation works, the optimum settings of its control parameters are obtained on the basis of global off-line robustness for use in off-line applications. Two optimization problems are Presented to illustrate the usefulness of the RCGA. In case of a constrained problem, a penalty strategy is incorporated to transform the constrained problem into an unconstrained problem by penalizing infeasible solutions.