A manufacturing cell design problem (MCDP) consists in creating an optimal production plant layout. The production plant is composed of cells which in turn are composed of machines that process part families of products. The goal is to minimize part flow among cells in order to reduce production costs and increase productivity. In this paper, we focus on modeling and solving the MCDP by using state-of-the-art constraint programming (CP) techniques. We implement different optimization models and we solve it by using two solving engines. Our preliminary results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed implementations, indeed the global optima is reached in all instances and in competitive runtime. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.