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Abstract The chain rule is a standard tool in differential calculus to find derivatives of composite functions. Faà di Bruno’s formula is a generalization of the chain rule and states a method to find high-order derivatives. In this contribution, we propose an algorithm based on Faà di Bruno’s formula and Bell polynomials (Bell in Ann Math 29:38–46, 1927; Parks and Krantz in A primer of real analytic functions, 2012) to compute the structure of derivatives of function compositions. The application of our method is showcased using trajectory planning for the heat equation (Laroche et al. in Int J Robust Nonlinear Control 10(8):629–643, 2000).