In traditional layout design approach, inter-cell layout and flow path layout of the Material Handling System (MHS) of any manufacturing system is being carried out in step by step manner. This leads to sub-optimal solutions for facility layout problems (FLP). In this work an attempt is made to concurrently design the Inter-cell layout and the MHS using GA based meta heuristic using simulated annealing as local search tool (GASAA) for a Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS) environment under open field configuration. The proposed algorithm is employed to optimize one of the classical objective namely, Total material handling cost (TMHC). The algorithm is tested on two different bench mark problem instances and with different initial problem data sets. It is found that the proposed algorithm is able to produce good solutions in reasonable computational effort. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.