Patent 7181470 was granted and assigned to Hitachi on February, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A distribution system having plural elements including one or more computation devices holds distributed common data without distinction between master data and duplicate data upon entrance or withdrawal of the elements. Coincidence among the common data is obtained by majority rule. In the majority rule, a significance level is defined for each common data, and the significance level is utilized as a weight in majority rule for coincidence among the common data.