Generalized fuzzy matrices

We give a systematic development of fuzzy matrix theory. Many of our results generalize to matrices over the two element Boolean algebra, over the nonnegative real numbers, over the nonnegative integers, and over the semirings, and we present these generalizations. Our first main result is that while spaces of fuzzy vectors do not have a unique basis in general they have a unique standard basis, and the cardinality of any two bases are equal. Thus concepts of row and column basis, row and column rank can be defined for fuzzy matrices. Then we study Green's equivalence classes of fuzzy matrices. New we give criteria for a fuzzy matrix to be regular and prove that the row and column rank of any regular fuzzy matrix are equal. Various inverses are also studied. In the next section, we obtain bounds for the index and period of a fuzzy matrix.