Job shop scheduling problem is typically a NP-Hard problem. In the recent past efforts put by researchers were to provide the most generic genetic algorithm to solve efficiently the job shop scheduling problems. Less attention has been paid to initial population aspects in genetic algorithms and much attention to recombination operators. Therefore authors are of the opinion that by proper design of all the aspects in genetic algorithms starting from initial population may provide better and promising solutions. Hence this paper attempts to enhance the effectiveness of genetic algorithm by providing a new look to initial population. This new technique along with job based representation has been used to obtain the optimal or near optimal solutions of 66 benchmark instances which comprise of varying degree of complexity.

Due to NP-Hard nature of the Job Shop Scheduling Problems (JSP), exact methods fail to provide the optimal solutions in quite reasonable computational time. Due to this nature of the problem, so many heuristics and meta-heuristics have been proposed in the past to get optimal or near-optimal solutions for easy to tough JSP instances in lesser computational time compared to exact methods. One of such heuristics is genetic algorithm (GA). Representations in GA will have a direct impact on computational time it takes in providing optimal or near optimal solutions. Different representation schemes are possible in case of Job Scheduling Problems. These schemes in turn will have a higher impact on the performance of GA. It is intended to show through this paper, how these representations will perform, by a comparative analysis based on average deviation, evolution of solution over entire generations etc.