Aiming at the problems of low design efficiency and difficult to acquire and apply design knowledge efficiently, an intelligent design system for excavating device of potato harvester was constructed. Based on the collection of mining shovel design rules, the knowledge of mining device design was expressed and stored by production, frame and mixed knowledge representation methods, and the knowledge base of intelligent design system was established. Visual Studio software was used to build a knowledge management system to realize the management of rule class and instance class knowledge. The reasoning mechanism of intelligent design system was discussed by using the method of rule-based and case-based forward reasoning. Based on SolidWorks secondary development technology, parametric modeling of mining device was realized. Based on excavating resistance analysis and RecurDyn-EDEM co-simulation test, the working performance evaluation system of excavating device was constructed. With Visual Studio as the development platform, VB.NET as the development language, SolidWorks API interface technology and MySQL data management method were applied to realize the integration and joint application of design knowledge base, knowledge management system, inference machine, parametric model base and evaluation system, and an intelligent design system for excavating device of potato harvester was established. An example of excavating shovel was designed with the system, and its performance was evaluated and analyzed. The results showed that the traction force required by the 〖JP2〗excavating shovel example was 856.24 N, and the traction resistance of the simulation test was 724.81 N, the exposture rate and the damaged rate were 97.22% and 1.43%, and the excavating shovel example met the design requirements.