Medication dispensers treated in this paper are designed to help improve compliance by users who live at homes and take medications over long periods of time. The paper first presents an overview of medication specifications that define constraints for dispensers and dispenser components that administer medications as specified. When given a specification and constraints defined by it, the dispenser scheduler checks for consistency and feasibility of constraints and schedules medications to meet the constraints. Several basic algorithms needed for these purposes are described and evaluated.

Several theorems are presented which characterize Goppa codes having the property of becoming cyclic when an overall parity cheek is added. If such a Goppa code has location setL = GF (q^{m})and a Goppa polynomialg(z)that is irreducible overGF(q^{m}), theng(z)must be a quadratic. Goppa codes defined by(z- \beta)^{a}and location setLwith cardinalitynsuch thatn+l|q^{m}-1are considered along with their subcodes. A sufficient condition onLis derived for the extended codes to become cyclic. This condition is also necessary whena= 1. The construction ofLfor differentnsatisfying the stated condition is investigated in some detail. Some irreversible Goppa codes have been shown to become cyclic when extended by an overall parity check.