Tolerances on posets

Abstract

The concept of a tolerance relation, shortly called tolerance, was studied on various algebras since the seventieth of the twentieth century by B. Zelinka and the first author. Since tolerances need not be transitive, their blocks may overlap and hence in general the set of all blocks of a tolerance cannot be converted into a quotient algebra in the same way as in the case of congruences. However, G. Cz\'edli showed that lattices can be factorized by means of tolerances in a natural way, and J. Grygiel and S. Radelecki proved some variant of an Isomorphism Theorem for tolerances on lattices. The aim of the present paper is to extend the concept of a tolerance on a lattice to posets in such a way that results similar to those obtained for tolerances on lattices can be derived.