An arithmetic approach for the computing with words paradigm

Computing with words applications are mostly built using rule-based systems, which have some important deficits: First, it is not easy to deal with high dimension problems because the size of the rule base increases exponentially; second, it is not possible to concatenate two or more systems without losing information; and third, there are no ways to compute inputs from outputs. In this article we show an alternative kind of system that remedies those deficits in many applications. It is based on fuzzy arithmetic rather than fuzzy logic. We also show application examples. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.