Simplification of a fuzzy mechanism with rule combination

 In this paper, a systematic approach to reduce the complexity of a fuzzy controller with the rule combination of a fuzzy rule base is presented. The complexity of a fuzzy controller is defined to be the computation load in this work. The proposed rule combination approach can be applied to the fuzzy mechanisms with product–sum and min–max inferences. With the input membership functions indexed in sequence for each input variable, the n-dimensional fuzzy rule table is represented as vectors so that the combination of the fuzzy rule base is realizable. Then the adjacent fuzzy rules with the same output consequent are combined to have smaller size of fuzzy rule base. The fuzzy mechanism with the combined rule table is shown to have the same output with the original fuzzy mechanism (without rule combination). Thus, in many applications, the rule combination approach presented in this paper can be used to reduce the complexity of the fuzzy mechanism without degrading the performances. Moreover, the Don't Care fuzzy rules are defined and it is indicated that the number of the necessary fuzzy rules might be decreased when the Don't Care fuzzy rules are taken into consideration. Further, the properties of the simplification approach for the fuzzy rule base of the fuzzy mechanism are discussed.