Methods and readable media for using relative positioning of items or components in a structure with dynamic ranges, such as an elastic I/O bus design for an Integrated Circuit (IC), are disclosed. Embodiments may include a user-defined type module having user-defined types representing relative instance positions within a structure. Embodiments may also include a translation helper module to receive information associated with a hierarchy and to return location information associated with the hierarchy and a translation module to translate between a specific location and a relative position of the instance based on one or more user-defined types and location information returned from the translation helper module to generate a list of translated results. Further embodiments of the translation module may include a relative position determiner to translate specific locations to relative positions and may also include a specific location determiner to translate relative positions to specific locations.