Abstract: To select innovative candidates from symbolic schemes generated by the rule-based conceptual design method, athe basic mechanisms and their connections included in the symbolic scheme should be identified．Based on the positions of the functional links and the links'state numbers in the symbolic scheme, athe adjacency matrix based iterative algorithms for identification of the driving mechanisms and the basic mechanisms are presented．Five kinds of general connections among basic mechanisms are described mathematically．A traverse algorithm to figure out the connecting relations among basic mechanisms is presented．With the algorithms presented in this paper, athe symbolic scheme can be automatically decomposed into the basic mechanisms and their connections．