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In 1982, E. Trillas introduced the notion of indistinguishability operator with the main aim of fuzzifying the crisp notion of equivalence relation. In the study of such a class of operators, an outstanding property must be stressed. Concretely, there exists a duality relationship between indistinguishability operators and metrics. The aforesaid relationship was deeply studied by several authors that introduced a few techniques to generate metrics from indistinguishability operators and vice-versa. In the last years a new generalization of the metric notion has been introduced in the literature with the purpose of developing mathematical tools for quantitative models in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. The aforesaid generalized metrics are known as relaxed metrics. The main purpose of the present paper is to explore the possibility of making explicit a duality relationship between indistinguishability operators and relaxed metrics in such a way that the aforementioned classical techniques to generate both concepts, one from the other, can be extended to the new framework., This is a preprint version of the paper available from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00500-018-03675-9. This work is also supported by project PGC2018-095709-B-C21 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE), and PROCOE/4/2017 (Govern Balear, 50% P.O. FEDER 2014-2020 Illes Balears).