advice about serial numbers, sorting objects into families

I am working on a project where a facade is broken down into panels with a number of variables. I would like to sort the collection into like groupings - right now its a random jumble - and I was wondering if there are any tips to doing this. The dumbest way I see is to give each a sort of serial number in the form of a string and sifting through the pile looking for matches of each particular condition. But there must be a better way. Does anyone have any examples?

Is there a component for the method string.equals in something like Java? I am looking for equality in words not numbers...