when designing a fuzzy controller or system, you have constructed a fuzzy rule table experimentally. but you have obtained many fuzzy rules. in such a situations, what procedure do you suggest to reduce fuzzy rules?
there are several ways. Now I list two possibilities.
1) If can produce a significant number of the desired I/O of your desired controller you can use this data with automatic tools that extract fuzzy knowledge given a prefixed number of rules.
2) Another way that you can follow is to approximate your fuzzy controller. You can extract the above mentioned data from your large fuzzy controller and use the tools I described before.
For having an idea of these tools see my works in which I describe FuGeNeSys and the more recent GEFREX.
the methods I wrote before are have an interesting property: the number of rules is not tied to the power of the number of the inputs. For example, I have developed several fuzzy models with a few tens of rules (or less) with low errors and tens of inputs. Many other tool in literature do the same thing.
If your problem is the final computational time of your fuzzy model this is a great possibility.
Utilizing either a cascaded fuzzy system, or a fuzzy tree (if applicable), you can significantly reduce number of rules required to run your system. I have a few publications on the topic you could check out.