The article is devoted to automation of the software design stage. In the course of the study, the reasons for the high importance of this stage and the relevance of its automation were analyzed. The main stages of this stage were also considered and the existing systems that allow automating each of them were considered. In addition, an own solution was proposed within the framework of the problem of class structure refactoring based on the combinatorial optimization method. A solution method has been developed to improve the quality of the class hierarchy and tested on a real model.