This research presents a loading and balancing methodology for job shop control.The importance of achieving shop balance in many types of manu facturing job shops is shown and a large number of indices for measuring balance in the job shop are developed.In addition to the balance mea sures, other measures of performance indicating ability to meet due dates and levels of work in process are also employed.A method to provide good control in the operation of the job shop with respect to most measures of performance is presented. This method consists of setting up a pool of jobs prior to releasing them to the job shop and establishing a mathematical programming algorithm to select jobs to be loaded in the shop from the pool.It is shown by this research that most of the balance measures calculated, as well as all of the work in process level measures, are significantly improved by the control methodology derived.The job shop control methodology is also employed in conjunction with a variety of conditions such as shops with few interactions, job arrival distributions with static and dynamic means, and allowance of alternative machine operations.A job shop simulation model is utilized uo test the control methodology.