The procedure of grouping the machines and parts to form cells is called manufacturing cell design. The manufacturing cell design is an important step in the development and implementation of advanced manufacturing systems. For the successful implementation of the manufacturing systems, identification of independent manufacturing cells, i.e., cells where parts are completely processed in the cell and no intercell movements, is necessary in the design phase. In this paper, we developed a mixed integer programming model and genetic algorithm based procedure to solve the independent manufacturing cells design problem considering the alternative process plans and machines duplication. Several manufacturing parameters such as, production volume, machine capacity, processing time, number of cells and cell size, are considered in the process. The model determines the process plan for parts, port families and machine cells simultaneously. The model has been verified with the numerical examples.