A system of fuzzy relational equations with the max-Archimedeant-norm composition was considered. The relevant literature indicated that this problem can be reduced to the problem of finding all the irredundant coverings of a binary matrix. A divide-and-conquer approach is proposed to solve this problem and, subsequently, to solve the original problem. This approach was used to analyze the binary matrix and then decompose the matrix into several submatrices such that the irredundant coverings of the original matrix could be constructed using the irredundant coverings of each of these submatrices. This step was performed recursively for each of these submatrices to obtain the irredundant coverings. Finally, once all the irredundant coverings of the original matrix were found, they were easily converted into the minimal solutions of the fuzzy relational equations. Experiments on binary matrices, with the number of irredundant coverings ranging from 24 to 9680, were also performed. The results indicated that, for test matrices that could initially be partitioned into more than one submatrix, this approach reduced the execution time by more than three orders of magnitude. For the other test matrices, this approach was still useful because certain submatrices could be partitioned into more than one submatrix.
A note concerning the properties of a certain class of test matrices.
