Mating interaction, surface to surface interaction is prevalent in mechanical devices. It is a functional primitive from which complex mechanical function is synthesized. Transmission of power, of heat, and of fluids are examples of areas where the complex function of a device can be reduced to primitives based on the concept of mating. The purpose of the proposed work is to study how a certain kind of mechanical function, namely that which can be reduced to mating interaction, can be represented by constraint based languages. We will investigate how mating of mechanical parts can be represented by mating constraints and how synthesis of mechanical function from mating primitives can be represented by the hierarchical composition of the mating constraints of a constraint model. Our work will follow the theoretical/experimental methodology of artificial intelligence, exploratory programming. The research will be centered on a computational realization of the constraint paradigm, since this paradigm can formally represent the intuitive notions of mating interaction and those of functional decomposition and synthesis used in mechanical design.
