Patent ID: 8108059

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of searching with respect to an element in a design data including a plurality of elements stored in a storage, wherein the design data including information of relation between the elements, the method comprising: collecting the design data in the storage; associating one element with another element as either of a parent node or a child node, and one of the elements with an attribute of one of the elements as either of a parent node or a child node on the basis of the relation between the elements in the design data to have a network structure assigning links between the one and another elements, and between the one of the elements and the attribute of one of the elements to generate link information regarding the assigned link, storing the link information in the storage, setting an attribute of a link to each of the links in the link information; and when the element of which an attribute is to be changed is specified through an input unit, retrieving link information in the storage to obtain the parent node corresponding to the specified element, obtaining at least one of child nodes corresponding to the another element, and associated with the parent node, further obtaining a child node corresponding to the attribute of one of the elements; and displaying the parent node and the child node corresponding to the another element and the child node corresponding to the attribute of one of the elements on a display, so as to determine a range of influence due to a change of a design parameter of an element being narrowed down using the attribute of the link.