Cellular manufacturing system (CMS) has been recognized as an alternative to improve manufacturing productivity in conventional batch-type manufacturing systems through reducing set-up times, work-in-process inventories and throughput times by means of group technology. Most of the studies on the design of CMS assumed that each part has a unique process plan, and that its demand is known as a deterministic value despite of the probabilistic nature of the real world problems. This study suggests an approach for designing CMS, considering both alternative process plans and uncertain demand. A mathematical model is presented to show how to minimize the expected amortized and operating costs satisfying these two relaxations. Four heuristic algorithms are developed based on tabu search which is well suited for getting an optimal or near-optimal solution. Example problems are carried out to illustrate the heuristic algorithms and each of them is compared with the deterministic counterpart.