The competitiveness of modern equipment enterprises and their products largely depends on whether they can provide products to meet the market demand at the fastest speed, that is, whether they have advanced design methods to support the efficient research and development process. Aiming at the problem in low integral level of agricultural machinery research and development in China, as well as various types and significant regional differences result in a variety of professional knowledge, structural forms, practical experience and so on, making it difficult for individual designers to fully grasp, unable to guarantee the quality of research and development, and severely restricting the industrial development and independent innovation ability, thus the development process of design methods was comprehensively reviewed, the characteristics of times at each stage and the generation rules of advanced design methods were analyzed, the advanced design methods and development direction suitable for agricultural equipment was discussed, and the realization of the strategic goals set for agricultural equipment in major national development plans such as “Made in China 2025” was supported. The research showed that the trend of intelligent design based on digital technology was obvious, which represented the development direction and the highest level of advanced design by combining the current technological level and social background, making full use of the advantages of 3D-CAD virtual reality and the development results of computer technology. Intelligent design was characterized by knowledge reuse, based on digital model resource, carried by product data management (PDM) and product lifecycle management (PLM) platform, and organized and connected upstream and downstream design-related research links such as scheme reasoning, digital mockup (DMU), computer aided engineering (CAE), computer aided process planning (CAPP) by the generalized computer aided design concept. In this way, intelligent design can implement the high integration of CAX, which was the practical application of artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of design. The development ideas of current advanced design were clarified, basic theory and system architecture for the establishment of equipment intelligent design system were provided, and it had significant theoretical value and practical guiding significance for fully integrating industry resources, highly sharing achievements and professional knowledge, greatly improving research and development efficiency and level, and significantly enhancing the core competitiveness of Chinese equipment enterprises and their products.