Generally, parallel redundancy is used to improve reliability in many systems. However, redundancy increases system cost, weight, volume, power, etc. Due to limited availability of these resources, the system designer has to maximize reliability subject to various constraints or minimize resources while satisfying the minimum requirement of system reliability. This paper presents GAs (Genetic Algorithms) to solve redundancy allocation in series-parallel systems. To apply the GAs to this problem, we propose a genetic representation, the method for initial population construction, evaluation and genetic operators. Especially, to improve the performance of GAs, we develop heuristic operators (heuristic crossover, heuristic mutation) using the reliability-resource information of the chromosome. Experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The performance comparison between the proposed algorithm and a pervious method shows that our approach is more efficient.