This paper presents an effective method of network overload management in power systems. The three competing objectives 1) generation cost 2) transmission line overload and 3) real power loss are optimized to provide pareto-optimal solutions. A fuzzy ranking based non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II) is used to solve this complex nonlinear optimization problem. The minimization of competing objectives is done by generation rescheduling. Fuzzy ranking method is employed to extract the best compromise solution out of the available non-dominated solutions depending upon its highest rank. N-1 contingency analysis is carried out to identify the most severe lines and those lines are selected for outage. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated for different contingency cases in IEEE 30 and IEEE 118 bus systems with smooth cost functions and their results are compared with other single objective evolutionary algorithms like Particle swarm optimization (PSO) and Differential evolution (DE). Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach to generate well distributed pareto-optimal non-dominated solutions of multi-objective problem