Although the requirement of logic completeness is not necessary, most engin
eers are used to building a complete rule base, due to a lack of knowledge
about the physical properties of a system. This situation leads to unnecess
ary computations in rule inference and the control algorithm may be intract
able in real time. It is worthwhile to refine a complete rule base by means
of some strategies. In this paper, a rule base refactoring method is propo
sed. This method, which can reduce the number of rules without having any o
ther significant effect, is inspired by the methods for gates minimization
of logic design. Experiments were conducted to study the control of an inve
rted pendulum and backer-upper truck due to their apparent property of non-
linearity. The results of the experiments show that the control behavior of
the fuzzy controller with the tuned rule base is still similar to that of
the controller with the original rule base.