Implementation of cellular manufacturing systems (CMS) is thriving among manufacturing companies due to many advantages that are attained by applying this system. In this study CMS formation and layout problems are considered. An Electromagnetism like (EM-like) algorithm is developed to solve the mentioned problems. In addition the required modifications to make EM-like algorithm applicable in these problems are mentioned. A heuristic approach is developed as a local search method to improve the quality of solution of EM-like. Beside in order to examine its performance, it is compared with two other methods. The performance of EM-like algorithm with proposed heuristic and GA are compared and it is demonstrated that implementing EM-like algorithm in this problem can improve the results significantly in comparison with GA. In addition some statistical tests are conducted to find the best performance of EM-like algorithm and GA due to their parameters. The convergence diagrams are plotted for two problems to compare the convergence process of the algorithms. For small size problems the performances of the algorithms are compared with an exact algorithm (Branch & Bound