Pneumatics is widly used in the industrial implementation, in the operation of air-powered actuators and the control devices needed in their operation. However, there are many empirical factors in pneumatics design, it might cause excessive design of pneumatic components. For that reason, we developed VDES(Vacuum Design Expert System) for the economic design of pneumatic vacuum equipment. VDES is achieved with CLIPS(C Language Integrated Production System) and knowledge base that contains a number of facts and rules for pneumatic vacuum design. Forward chaining and depth first search technique are used in this system. Appling VDES to the actual field, this system is verified to be a good efficiency and could be applied to the field of pneumatic vacuum equipment design.