Retrieval using configuration spaces

When designing mechanisms, making use of examples in past designs and handbooks should lead to cost reduction by promoting the sharing of parts and subassemblies among products, as well as reductions in time and effort. At present, however, the process of surveying design examples is left almost entirely to human designers, and little computerised aid has been developed. This chapter describes a computerised method of retrieving mechanism designs from a library by specifying a required behaviour using qualitative configuration space as a retrieval index.