Systems and methods of determining node similarity for component substitution. An example of a method may be carried out by program code stored on non-transient computer-readable medium and executed by a processor. The method includes estimating a normalized similarity metric between the plurality of nodes in the system tree and nodes in other trees. The method also includes assigning a similarity score to each compared node using at least one of: domain based rules, attribute based similarity metrics, and machine learning. The method also includes combining results for cluster analysis.