This paper considers a unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem with ready times, due times and sequence and machine-dependent setup times. The objective of this problem is to determine the allocation of jobs and the scheduling of machines to minimize the total tardy time. A mathematical model for optimal solution is derived. An in-depth analysis of the model shows that it is very complicated and difficult to obtain optimal solutions as the problem size becomes large. Therefore, a genetic algorithm using an effective dispatching method is proposed. The performance of the proposed genetic algorithm is evaluated using several randomly generated examples.