When does a semiring become a residuated lattice?

Abstract: It is an easy observation that every residuated lattice is in fact a semiring because multiplication distributes over join and the other axioms of a semiring are satisfied trivially. This semiring is commutative, idempotent and simple. The natural question arises if the converse assertion is also true. We show that the conversion is possible provided the given semiring is, moreover, completely distributive. We characterize semirings associated to complete residuated lattices satisfying the double negation law where the assumption of complete distributivity can be omitted. A similar result is obtained for idempotent residuated lattices.