Traditionally the design of physical layout of the manufacturing system (Inter-cell layout) and subsequently the design of Material Handling System (MHS) is being carried out in isolation. In this work an attempt is made to concurrently design Inter -Cell Layout and the MHS using a Genetic Algorithm based methodology for a Cellular Manufacturing System (CMS) environment under open field configuration. The proposed algorithm is employed to simultaneously optimize two contradicting objectives viz. 1. Total material handling cost (TMHC) 2.Total corner score (TCS). The algorithm is tested on four different bench mark layouts and with different initial problem data sets. It is found that the proposed algorithm is able to produce satisfactory solutions consistently within a reasonable computational limit. © 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.