Mating constraint languages for assembly sequence planning

The authors analyze the most commonly used form of constraint languages for assembly planning: mating constraint languages. These constraints are typically composed of relations asserting that a certain pair of parts must be mated before some other pair of parts may be mated. However there are many significant differences between the forms of these constraints used by different authors. It is proven that some of these forms, such as those based on less-than relations and those based on less-than-or-equal-to relations, are equivalent. A variety of theorems that address which kinds of mating constraint languages are able to represent which kinds of sets of plans are included