This work investigates the use of Genetic Algorithms and Cooperative Co-Evolution in optimization of scheduling problems with precedence constraints. In this kind of problem some or all tasks have constraints that imply planning or executing them before or after others. For this reason, the use of order-based conventional evolutionary models may generate invalid solutions, which cannot be penalized, needing to be discarded and therefore compromising the algorithm performance. The main goal was therefore to study models for this kind of problem that are capable of generating only valid solutions. The work was divided in 3 main steps: a survey on scheduling optimization problems using genetic algorithms; definition of two models based on genetic algorithms and cooperative co-evolution for optimizing scheduling problems with precedence constraints; and the implementation of a tool for a case study. The study on scheduling optimization problems with genetic algorithms consisted in gathering information about representations and characteristics of this kind of problem and, more specifically, about order-based representations. The genetic algorithm modeling consisted basically in defining a chromosome representation and an evaluation function that took into account the existence of precedence constraints (tasks that must be scheduled or executed before others). The co-evolutionary model consisted in defining a new population, with another representation scheme, which was responsible for distributing resources for tasks execution. On the conventional genetic algorithm model, this role was played by a simple set of heuristics. Finally, a tool was developed for implementing those models and treating a complex case study which offered the needed characteristics for testing representation performance and evaluating results. The chosen case study was the optimization of iron ore dumping, stocking and ship loading on a fictitious harbor, targeting minimization of ships waiting time. Tests were done in order to demonstrate the ability of the developed models in generating viable solutions without the need of corrective heuristics and the results were compared to the results obtained through exhaustive search. In all cases, the models` results were better than the exhaustive search ones. In the case where the representation used a single population the results obtained were up to 41% better than the ones with the exhaustive search. The co- evolutionary results outperformed the co-evolutionary search with the same solution representation by 33%. Compared to the single specie genetic algorithm, the co- evolutionary model outperformed it by 29%.