We show that independence conditions of two sets, introduced by Ioffe
and Clarke and Raissi, are equivalent when one of the sets is compactl
y epi-Lipschitzian. Under these conditions, we give an estimate of the
distance function to the intersection (resp. its subdifferential) in
terms of the sum of the distance functions (resp. their subdifferentia
l). These results extend those of Ioffe, Clarke and Raissi, Rockafella
r ....