In this paper, the design of geometrical shapes of function carriers and their layout in given space is called configuration design. The constraint satisfaction problem in configuration design may be difficult to solve due to the lack of tight constraints and the countless combinations of the layout; a diversity of solutions that satisfy the constraints should be allowed. Therefore, to allow such diversity, we directed our attention to developmental processes in biology and proposed an adaptive-growth-type 3D representation based on evolutionary algorithms. Here, the adaptive-growth-type means the shape expressed in the process, which develops through interaction with an outside environment, like shape generation of a living organism in the natural world. The usefulness of the representation was verified by applying it to the component layout problem in the early stage of satellite design.
