Characterizing when an ordinal sum of t-norms is a t-norm on bounded lattices

One of the most important operators in soft computing are the triangular norms (t-norms), as well as the combination among them. The ordinal sum of triangular norms on [0, 1] has been used to construct other triangular norms. However, on a bounded lattice, an ordinal sum of t-norms may not be a t-norm. Several necessary and sufficient conditions are presented in this paper for ensuring whether an ordinal sum on a bounded lattice of arbitrary t-norms is, in fact, a t-norm. Moreover, we show that a large set of ordinal sums verify these conditions. Hence, they are very interesting in order to verify whether an ordinal sum on a bounded lattice is a t-norm for a particular family of t-norms. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.