In a vacuum circuit breaker mechanism, a spring-actuated linkage system is used to satisfy the desired opening and closing characteristics of electric contacts. If the type and structure of the linkage system required to the circuit breaker is predetermined, the stiffness, free length and attachment points of a spring become the important design parameters. In this paper, based on the energy conservation that the total system energy is constant throughout the operating range of the mechanism, a systematic procedure for optimizing the spring design parameters is developed and applied to the simplified mechanism of a circuit breaker. Then, in order to consider the complex dynamics of the circuit breaker mechanism rather well, the developed procedure is converted to the environment of a multi-body dynamics program ADAMS.