A new fuzzy method for dealing with inconsistency Production System application

In many industrial branches, the enterprises have nearly the same technical level and the differences in their success rates are mainly due to how they satisfy users' needs. A close look at the manufacturing system level shows that the problem is not only to identify those needs, which are mostly qualitative and inconsistent, but to have the capacity and tools to assess this type of qualitative data and deal with its inconsistency. As regards qualitative data, many authors have worked on this problem using fuzzy set tools. However, reviewing the literature contents shows that only a few papers have concentrated their efforts on the inconsistency. In this paper, we propose a contribution consisting in a distance-based method which tries to preserve and transform the inconsistency by introducing a cover index.