Novational transformations

The term ‘novational transformation’ is used to refer to a particular kind of geometric transformation that allows the shape of a configuration to be modified by specifying one or more ‘movements’. Novational transformations are of great value in configuration processing, in particular, in relation to shape generation for space structures. The objective of the present paper is to explain the general idea of a novational transformation and to describe the details of the novational transformations that are available for use in the programming language Formian. The material is presented in terms of a number of examples