Invertible incline matrices and Cramer's rule over inclines (Q1887611)

The authors give a description of the invertible matrices over inclines. Inclines are the additively idempotent semirings in which the products are less or equal to factors. The concept of incline, its properties and applications were described by \textit{Z.-Q. Cao, K. H. Kim} and \textit{F. W. Roush} [Incline algebra and applications. Ellis Horwood Series in Mathematics and Its Applications. Chichester: Ellis Horwood Limited; New York etc.: Halsted Press, a Division of John Wiley \& Sons. (1984; Zbl 0541.06009)]. The inclines generalize Boolean algebra, fuzzy algebra and distributive lattice, and so Boolean matrices, fuzzy matrices and lattice matrices are examples of matrices over inclines. Let \(L\) be an incline and \(a\in L\). The least positive integer \(k\) verifying \(a^{k}=a^{k+d}\) for some positive integer \(d\) is called an index of \(a\). Let \(A\in M_{n}(L)\) and the map \( f_{A}:L^{n}\rightarrow L^{n}\) defined by \(f_{A}(x)=Ax\) for \(x\in L^{n}\). Then the authors prove that for \(A\in M_{n}(L)\) the following statements are equivalent: (1) \(A\) is right invertible; (2) \(A\) is left invertible; (3) \(A\) is invertible; (4) \(AA^{T}=I\); (5) \(A^{T}A=I\); (6) \(A^{T}A=AA^{T}=I\); (7) \( A^{k}=I\) for some positive integer \(k\); (8) \(f_{A}\) is a surjective mapping; (9) \(f_{A}\) is a bijective mapping; (10) \(f_{A}\) preserves the scalar products; (11) \(A\in M_{n}(I(L))\), where \(I(L)\) is the set of all idempotent elements and \(f_{A}\) is an injective mapping; (12) \(A\) has index and \(f_{A}\) is an injective mapping. They also prove an expansion theorem for the permanent of an \(m\times n\) matrix over an incline, that the permanent of an invertible incline matrix is equal to 1 and they establish Cramer's rule over inclines. Finally, they study some properties of the group of all \(n\times n\) invertible incline matrices. The main obtained results in the paper generalize corresponding existing results in the literature for Boolean matrices, fuzzy matrices and lattice matrices.