DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Priority
2. Receipt is acknowledged of certified copies of papers required by 37 CFR 1.55.
Claim Status
3. Claims 11-16, 18, and 20 are pending in this application. Claims 11-16, 18, and 20 were amended, and claims 17 and 19 were canceled.
Examiner’s Note
4. The examiner would welcome an interview to clarify any of the various rejections seen below in order to expedite prosecution of the instant application.
We apologize for overlooking grounds for the rejections of all claims under 35 U.S.C. 101 in the first office action. Even though applicant has amended claims after the first action, because applicant’s amendments have overcome all rejections cited in the first action, we issue this new action as a second non-final rejection rather than as a final rejection.
Response to Arguments
4. Applicant’s arguments, see Arguments/Remarks, filed December 17, 2025, with respect to objections to claims 11-17 and 20 have been fully considered and are persuasive. The objections to claims 11-17 and 20 have been withdrawn. Applicant has corrected potentially confusing usage.
5. Applicant’s arguments, see Arguments/Remarks, filed December 17, 2025, with respect to rejections of all claims under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) have been fully considered and are persuasive. The rejections of all claims have been withdrawn. Applicant has satisfactorily addressed all points of indefiniteness cited in the first action.
6. Applicant’s arguments, see Arguments/Remarks, filed December 17, 2025, with respect to rejections of all claims under 35 U.S.C. 102 and 35 U.S.C. 103 have been fully considered and are persuasive. The rejections of all claims have been withdrawn. Applicant’s incorporation of the limitations of canceled claims 17 and 19 into independent claim 11 combined with their repair of issues of indefiniteness associated with the canceled claims has overcome prior art rejections from the first action. Independent claim 11 (as well as independent claim 20) is now considered to contain allowable potentially allowable subject matter if new rejections under 35 U.S.C. 101 can be overcome.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
7. Claims 11-16, 18, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea (the combination of mental processes with a method of organizing human activity) without significantly more. The claims recite an abstract idea without significantly more because the additional elements fail to both integrate into a practical application or provide an inventive concept. This judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application because all non-abstract elements are either deemed insignificant extra-solution activity or else are part of the well-understood field of use of the invention. The claims do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception because the only additional elements are a) a controller that is not disclosed to have any features above and beyond a general purpose computer, and b) abstract transport vehicles not claimed to have any features or functions apart from their names; the vehicles are devoid of internal structure, and so are little more than black boxes and in any event serve merely to define a field of use of the invention. Moreover, the transport vehicles are not claimed to be autonomous or robotic, and so communication with them may be communication with human drivers, which would make applicant’s method one of human organization.
The eligibility analysis in support of these findings is provided below. Independent claim 11 is representative of all rejected claims and will be considered as an exemplar for these claims.
With respect to Step 1 of the eligibility inquiry, the transport vehicle system of claim 1 is ostensibly directed to an eligible category of subject matter, i.e. a system comprising machines. Thus, Step 1 is satisfied.
With respect to Step 2A Prong One, the claims recite an abstract idea in the form of mental processes and a method of organizing human activity.
Regarding Prong I of the Step 2A analysis in the 2019 PEG, the claims are to be analyzed to determine whether they recite subject matter that falls within one of the following groups of abstract ideas: a) mathematical concepts, b) certain methods of organizing human activity, and/or c) mental processes. In this case, the invention is primarily concerned with “mental processes” and also “certain methods of organizing human activity”.
Analysis of the further limitations of claim 1 follows:
comprising: a plurality of transport vehicles;While vehicles are machines and as such are ostensibly acceptable as subjects of an invention, we consider these vehicles to be mere abstractions because they are not further limited in form or function. To the extent they have any concrete qualities implied by their name, they only define the field of use of the invention. Moreover, these are not claimed to be autonomous or robotic vehicles and so may have human drivers, which introduces human organization.
and a controller configured or programmed to issue transport instructions to the plurality of transport vehiclesA controller is understood in the art to be a general purpose computer. Without particular technological limitations, such a disclosure does not advance the state of the art. Issuing instructions is a form of transmitting data over a network, which has been found to be a well-understood, routine, and conventional process, as per OIP Techs., Inc., v. Amazon.com, Inc., 788 F.3d 1359, 1363, 115 USPQ2d 1090, 1093 (Fed. Cir. 2015).
issue a first transport instruction with a first priority to a vacant transport vehicle when a first transport request is received in a state in which a number of vacant transport vehicles is a first number;This is another example of merely issuing electronic instructions. The claimed priority and state is not limited to be determined in any manner beyond human capability.
not issue a second transport instruction with a second priority lower than the first priority to a vacant transport vehicle when a second transport request is received in a state in which the number of vacant transport vehicles is the first number;This negative limitation is not beyond human capability to determine as regards its enabling conditions.
increase a priority of a transport instruction, including the first transport instruction and the second transport instruction, which has not been issued to any transport vehicle, according to a passage of time since a transport request corresponding to the transport instruction has been receivedIncreasing a numeric priority according to a passage of time is a simple arithmetic operation based on a determination easily performed unaided by a human.
and allow the priority of the transport instruction to be increased up to an upper limit, and the upper limit is set to be larger as the priority of the transport instruction is higher when the transport request corresponding to the transport instruction is received.Again, this is a simple arithmetic determination of an upper limit based on an initial value.
All these limitations are within the scope of human capabilities. No special hardware or other inventive structures appears in these claims apart from the abstract transport vehicles and a controller or general purpose computer. To the extent any computer system is implied by the limitations, per MPEP 2106.05(a) the invention does not “purport to improve the functioning of the computer itself” nor does it improve “any other technology or technical field.“ In particular, the courts have indicated that the mere automation of manual processes does not constitute an improvement in computer functionality (MPEP 2106.05(a)(I), second paragraph iii).
With respect to Step 2A Prong Two, the judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. The additional elements are directed to control of abstract “transport vehicles”. This could have been done even in ancient times by a human dispatcher managing, for example, ox carts or triremes. No particular machine is claimed apart from the controller (a general purpose computer) and the said transport vehicles, which are not claimed to have any special form, function, or structure beyond that implied by the term “transport vehicle”. These elements fail to integrate the abstract idea into a practical application because they fail to provide an improvement to the functioning of a computer or to any other technology or technical field, fail to apply the exception with a particular machine, fail to effect a transformation of a particular article to a different state or thing, and fail to apply or use the abstract idea in a meaningful way beyond generally linking the use of the judicial exception to a particular technological environment.
Accordingly, because the Step 2A Prong One and Prong Two analysis resulted in the conclusion that the claims are directed to an abstract idea, additional analysis under Step 2B of the eligibility inquiry must be conducted in order to determine whether any claim element or combination of elements amount to significantly more than the judicial exception.
With respect to Step 2B, the claims do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception. The limitation, “a controller configured or programmed to: issue transport instructions to the plurality of transport vehicles”, describes an abstract process of computer communication that is well-understood, routine, and conventional and which thus fails to add “significantly more” than the judicial exception. These elements have been considered, but add nothing more to what is essentially an act of mental process and human organization.
Independent method claim 20 parallels system claim 1 and recites limitations of similar scope. Both claims are found to be directed to patent-ineligible subject matter.
Dependent claims 11-16, and 18 have been fully considered as well. The dependent claims add no inventive material substantially different from the analysis associated with claim 1; rather, they merely elaborate the method of the independent claims with more details, none of which add significant elements that transcend what are essentially mental processes and human organization. There is no indication that the combinations of elements in these claims improves the functioning of a computer or improves any other technology.
Allowable Subject Matter
8. Claims 11 and 20 would be allowable if rewritten or amended to overcome the rejections under 35 U.S.C. 101, set forth in this Office action.
Claims 12-16 and 18 would be allowable if rewritten to overcome the rejections under 35 U.S.C. 101, set forth in this Office action and to include all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
9. The following is a statement of reasons for the indication of allowable subject matter: regarding independent claim 11, in the first action, a point of indefiniteness in dependent claim 19 rendered a key limitation of that claim unexaminable as it could not be understood. A teaching of reference El-Haj was cited in rejection of claim 19 based on the understood portion of the claim. However, applicant has now repaired and clarified the point of indefiniteness. As a result, El-Haj no longer teaches all the limitations of claim 19, which has been canceled and its limitations incorporated into claim 11 along with those of its intermediate parent claim 17. New search triggered by the amendments has failed to yield a suitable replacement for or addition to El-Haj. In the context of the claimed transport vehicle system, the new amendment to the effect that transport task priority increases over time but is limited by an upper priority threshold that is not fixed over the whole system but rather is based, per task, on the initial priority of the task was neither found, nor taught, nor fairly suggested by the prior art of record. Dependent claims 12-16, 18, and 20 inherit the potential allowability of claim 11.
Any comments considered necessary by applicant must be submitted no later than the payment of the issue fee and, to avoid processing delays, should preferably accompany the issue fee. Such submissions should be clearly labeled “Comments on Statement of Reasons for Allowance.”
Conclusion
10. Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to LAURENCE RAPHAEL BROTHERS whose telephone number is (703)756-1828. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 0830-1700.
Examiner interviews are available via telephone, in-person, and video conferencing using a USPTO supplied web-based collaboration tool. To schedule an interview, applicant is encouraged to use the USPTO Automated Interview Request (AIR) at http://www.uspto.gov/interviewpractice.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Ernesto Suarez can be reached at (571) 270-5565. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/ERNESTO A SUAREZ/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 3655
LAURENCE RAPHAEL BROTHERS
Examiner
Art Unit 3655A
/L.R.B./ Examiner, Art Unit 3655