Two new methods to construct fuzzy metrics from metrics

Abstract

In the last years, the interest in the notion of fuzzy metric has been growing in such a way that many works have focused their efforts on the study of their topological properties and their applications to Engineering problems. However, the applicability of fuzzy metrics is limited due to lack of examples in the literature. Motivated, on the one hand, by these facts and, on the other hand, by the fact that most of the instances of fuzzy metrics in the literature are constructed from classical metrics, in this paper we introduce two new techniques which allow us to construct systematically fuzzy metrics from metrics in such a way that the celebrated classical method for constructing indistinguishability operators from metrics is retrieved as a particular case. Hence, we construct strong fuzzy metrics from a given classical one considering continuous Archimedean t-norms and the pseudo-inverse of their additive generators acting on the metric modified by a positive real function. Moreover, we extend this technique tackling the particular case of the minimum t-norm, which is continuous but non-Archimedean. In such a construction, two non-negative real functions are now involved in order to modify the classical metric and one of them must be superadditive. In this case, the fuzzy metric obtained is not strong in general. Furthermore, the new methods are illustrated by means of different examples which, in addition, show that some celebrated examples of fuzzy metrics can be retrieved as a particular case through them. Finally, in the light of the developed theory, an open problem about strong fuzzy metrics is solved completing the partial solutions that can be found in the literature.