Genetic Fuzzy Systems constitute an area that brings together Fuzzy Inference Systems and Meta-Heuristics that are often related to natural selection and genetic recombination. This area attracts great interest from the scientific community, due to the knowledge discovery capability in situations where the comprehension of the phenomenon under analysis is lacking. It can also provides support to decision makers. This dissertation aims at developing a new Generic Genetic Fuzzy System, called Genetic Programming Fuzzy Inference System (GPFIS). The main aspects of GPFIS model are the components which are part of its Fuzzy Inference procedure. This structure is basically composed of Multi-Gene Genetic Programming and intends to: (i ) apply aggregation operators, negation and linguistic hedges in a simple manner; (ii ) make use of heuristics to define the consequent term most appropriate to the antecedent part; (iii ) employ a defuzzification procedure that, driven by the fuzzification step and under some assumptions, can provide a most accurate estimate. All these features are contributions that can be extended to other Genetic Fuzzy Systems. In order to demonstrate the general aspect of GPFIS, its performance and the relevance of each of its components, several investigations have been performed. They deal with Classification, Forecasting, Regression and Control problems. By using the best configuration obtained for each of the four problems, results are compared to other Genetic Fuzzy Systems and models in the literature. Finally, applications of GPFIS actual cases in each category is reported.