A software concept for automated design of a multi-spindle drilling gear machine used in furniture production process is proposed. To find an optimised design of the target-machine, this means to find the minimum number of supports and gears as well as the optimised configuration of the multi-spindle drilling gears, an automated system based on pattern identification, knowledge discovery and automated decision process is explained. The transfer of acquired manual design experience from the human expert to a software strategy to solve the multi-criteria optimisation problem will achieve cost reductions during the machine design.