In this paper, the preemptive resource constrained project scheduling problem with set up times is investigated. In this problem, a fixed setup time is required to restart when an process is preempted. The project contains activities inter-related by finish to start type precedence relations with a time lag of zero, which require a set of renewable resources. The problem formed in this way is an NP-hard. A mixed integer programming model is proposed for the problem and a parameters tuned meta-heuristic namely genetic algorithm is proposed to solve it. To evaluate the validation and performance of the proposed algorithm a set of 100 test problems is used. Comparative statistical results show that the proposed algorithm is efficiently capable to solve the problem. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.