Fundamental relations in multialgebras. Applications

Based on the properties of the poset of those equivalence relations of a multialgebra for which the factor multialgebra is a universal algebra, we give a characterization for the fundamental relations of a multialgebra. We point out the benefits of our approach by giving two applications. One of them provides a new characterization of the commutative fundamental relation of a hyperring, and the other will give a general category theoretical property of the construction of the fundamental algebras (both in the general case and in the hyperring case). (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.