Extractive multi-document text summarization – a summarization with the aim of removing redundant information in a document collection while preserving its salient sentences – has recently enjoyed a large interest in proposing automatic models. This paper proposes an extractive multi-document text summarization model based on genetic algorithm (GA). First, the problem is modeled as a discrete optimization problem and a specific fitness function is designed to effectively cope with the proposed model. Then, a binary-encoded representation together with a heuristic mutation and a local repair operators are proposed to characterize the adopted GA. Experiments are applied to ten topics from Document Understanding Conference DUC2002 datasets (d061j through d070f). Results clarify the effectiveness of the proposed model when compared with another state-of-the-art model.