Summary: As part of the cellular manufacturing design process, machines must be grouped in cells and the corresponding part families must be assigned. Limits on both the number of machines per cell and the number of parts per family can be considered. A weighted sum of intracell voids and intercellular moves is used to evaluate the quality of the solutions. We present a tabu search algorithm that systematically explores feasible machine cells configurations determining the corresponding part families using a linear network flow model. The performance of this tabu search is benchmarked against two simulated annealing approaches, another tabu search approach and three heuristics: (ZODIAC, GRAFICS and MST).