The deviation of engine component performance has great impact on the Adaptive Cycle Engine (ACE) overall performance and task adaptability. To make ACE performance reach the mission requirement, proper standard of component performance deviation (CPD) should be given in advance. In this paper, an approach based on the first order Taylor series expansion has been proposed and applied to set the standard of CPD without large amounts of calculation. This approach is an inversion process of the normal interval analysis and can take the distinction between the impacts of CPD indexes into consideration. Fifteen component performance parameters and four important operating conditions are investigated. The results show that the distinction between the impacts of CPD indexes and different operating conditions is obvious. Compared with setting uniform standard for all CPD indexes, this method can better utilize component characteristics and make the standard reasonable and economical. The standard of CPD can be derived within 10 times of off-design point calculation through this method, which is much less than 32768 times of calculation for the vertex method. This method is universal and can be applied to setting standard for the CPD of other type of gas turbine engines.