Transitive closure and betweenness relations (Q5939643)

The paper is concerned with the development of indistinguishability operators being treated as a generalization of equivalence relations. The three general approaches in this regard are (a) max-t composition leading to transitive closures of fuzzy relations, (b) representation theorem in which relations are formed on a basis of a family of fuzzy sets, and (c) building decomposable relations from a fuzzy set. The study relates these three approaches in the case of Archimedean t-norms used in the above constructs. It is shown that indistinguishability operators generate metric betweenness relations in the sense of Menger and a structure of these relations depends on their length and dimension (in the general sense that greater dimension implies smaller length).