Abstract: To solve the problem of the workpiece inter-cell move in inter-cell scheduling for the cellular manufacturing system, an inter-cell scheduling method was proposed based on multi-agents coalitions (MAC). Considering the flexible inter-cell processing routes, a distributed negotiation mechanism was adopted to form grading coalitions and to carry out negotiation scheduling, so as to improve the performance of global optimization as well as reduce the communication. Experiments were taken to verify the proposed algorithm. The results show that the proposed algorithm can provide better performance with respect to the mean delay than the widely used combinatorial heuristic rules.