In manufacturing-cell-formation research, a major concern is to make groups of machines into machine cells and parts into part families. Extensive work has been carried out in this area using various models and techniques. Regarding these ideas, in this paper, experiments with varying parameters of the popular metaheuristic algorithm known as the genetic algorithm have been carried out with a bi-criteria objective function: the minimization of intercell moves and cell load variation. The probability of crossover (A), probability of mutation (B), and balance weight factor (C) are considered parameters for this study. The data sets used in this paper are taken from benchmarked literature in this field. The results are promising regarding determining the optimal combination of the genetic parameters for the machine-cell-formation problems considered in this study. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.