Traditional Chinese Medicine can be viewed as a health promotion and healing system that has been practice, based on both philosophy and practical experience, for thousands of years. Although this medicine is crucial in the information of integrative medicine, lack of methodology and experience sharing mechanisms has impeded the development of this specific branch of medicine. This study adopts a systematic approach to describe service flows in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Following a literature review, specialist meetings and field observations are conducted to gather opinions from different perspectives. A conceptual framework was created to describe entities involved in service flows for Tradition Chinese Medicine and their inter-relationships. The framework can be used to clarify the abstract knowledge of this medicine which can contribute to the development of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

The tree quorum algorithm, which logically organizes the sites in a system to a tree structure, is an efficient and fault-tolerant solution for distributed mutual exclusion. In this paper, the performance characteristics of the tree quorum algorithm is analyzed. A refinement algorithm is proposed to refine a logical tree structure by eliminating nodes or subtrees which do not improve the performance. Thus the refined tree performs better than the original.>

The tree quorum algorithm (TQA) uses a tree structure to generate intersecting (tree) quorums for distributed mutual exclusion. This paper analyzes the number of messages required to acquire a quorum in TQA. Let i be the depth of the complete binary tree used in TQA, and let M/sub i/ be the number of messages required to acquire a quorum or to determine that no quorum is accessible. We discuss M/sub i/ as a function of i and p, where p ( 1/2>

The tree quorum algorithm (TQA), which logically organizes the sites in a system into a tree, is an efficient and fault-tolerant solution for distributed mutual exclusion. Quorum size can be reduced to log N in the best case of TQA. In this paper, message complexity of TQA is analyzed. Moreover, it is shown that the ratio of message complexity to quorum size converges to 1/p, where p is the probability that a site is operational.>

H. Kakugawa et al. (1993) proposed the k-majority coterie for the distributed k-mutual exclusion problem (k-mutex). It was claimed that the k-majority coterie is a k-coterie, which is a general solution for k-mutex. In this comment, we show that the k-majority coterie is not necessary a k-coterie.>