Patent ID: 7752576

Claim:
An apparatus for supporting design of a design object, comprising: an input unit configured to input a specification description that includes a plurality of pieces of processing information, each piece indicative of a respective processing performed by the design object, and association information indicative of associations among the pieces of processing information; a node generating unit configured to generate a node for each of the pieces of processing information, the node with which a chart schematically indicating a content of the specification description is formed; a link generating unit configured to generate, based on the association information, a link that couples nodes generated by the node generating unit, the link with which the chart is formed; a sub-chart generating unit configured to generate a plurality of sub-charts by dividing the chart into a plurality of charts, based on the node and the link; a function-module generating unit to generate, for each of the sub-charts, a function module that executes a function based on the processing information corresponding to the node in the sub-chart and the association information corresponding to the link in the sub-chart; a cost setting unit configured to set a cost based on a bit length of a common variable used in common in the processing between pieces of the processing information that correspond to a pair of the nodes coupled by the link; and a link extracting unit to extract a lowest link, having a lowest cost, from among links in the chart.