Heegaard splittings and singularities of the product map of Morse functions

We give an upper bound for the Reidemeister-Singer distance between two Heegaard splittings in terms of the genera and the number of cusp points of the product map of Morse functions for the splittings. It suggests that a certain development in singularity theory may lead to the best possible bound for the Reidemeister-Singer distance.