DETAILED ACTION
Claims 1-13 are presented for examination.
Claim Objections
Claim 12 is objected to because of the following informalities:
In line 1, “computer readable” should be hyphenated.
Appropriate correction is required.
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.
Claims 1 and 5-13 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to a judicial exception (i.e., a law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea) without significantly more. Examiner has evaluated the claims under the framework provided in the 2019 Patent Eligibility Guidance published in the Federal Register 01/07/2019 and has provided such analysis below.
Step 1: Claims 1 and 5-9 are directed to methods and fall within the statutory category of processes. Claims 10 and 11 are directed to a system and a server and fall within the statutory category of machines. Claims 12 and 13 are directed to computer-readable media and fall within the statutory category of articles of manufacture.
Therefore, “Are the claims to a process, machine, manufacture or composition of matter?” Yes.
In order to evaluate the Step 2A inquiry “Is the claim directed to a law of nature, a natural phenomenon or an abstract idea?” we must determine, at Step 2A Prong 1, whether the claim recites a law of nature, a natural phenomenon or an abstract idea and further whether the claim recites additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application.
Step 2A Prong 1:
Claims 1 and 10-12: The limitations of “defining as a combinatorial optimization problem a function…” and “applying a heuristic algorithm to generate a solution…,” as drafted, are a process that, but for the recitation of generic computing components, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers performance of the limitation in the mind or with a pen and paper. For example, a person can easily define the parameters of an optimization problem and then determine a specific solution to that problem based on some parameters with the use of a pen and paper. Further, the step of “commanding…” is nothing more than a step of using a computer as a tool to perform a mental process (see MPEP § 2106.04(a)(2)).
Therefore, Yes, claim 1 recites judicial exceptions.
The claims have been identified to recite judicial exceptions, Step 2A Prong 2 will evaluate whether the claims are directed to the judicial exception.
Step 2A Prong 2:
Claims 1 and 10-12: The judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. In particular, the claims recite the following additional elements – “a group of multicore processors,” “a computer apparatus,” “an edge server,” “a non-transitory computer readable medium having stored thereon a computer program,” “a non-transitory computer-readable medium having stored thereon instructions…,” which are merely recitations of generic computing components and functions (see MPEP § 2106.05(b)) which do not integrate a judicial exception into practical application.
Therefore, “Do the claims recite additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application? No, these additional elements do not integrate the abstract idea into a practical application and they do not impose any meaningful limits on practicing the abstract idea. The claims are directed to an abstract idea.
After having evaluating the inquires set forth in Steps 2A Prong 1 and 2, it has been concluded that claims 1 and 10-13 not only recite a judicial exception but that the claims are directed to the judicial exception as the judicial exception has not been integrated into practical application.
Step 2B:
Claims 1 and 10-13: The claims do not include additional elements, alone or in combination, that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception. As discussed above with respect to integration of the abstract idea into a practical application, the additional elements amount to no more than generic computing components which do not amount to significantly more than the abstract idea.
Therefore, “Do the claims recite additional elements that amount to significantly more than the judicial exception? No, these additional elements, alone or in combination, do not amount to significantly more than the judicial exception.
Having concluded analysis within the provided framework, claims 1 and 10-13 do not recite patent eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101.
Claims 5-9 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 as non-statutory for at least the reasons stated above. The claims are dependent on the above independent claims, but do not add any feature or subject matter that would solve the non-statutory deficiencies of the claim on which each depends. Each claim simply adds either a clarification of the nature of the elements claimed in the independent claim or similar mental processing steps to add for the practitioner. Claims 5-9 do not add any steps or elements, when considered both individually and as a combination, that would convert claims 1 and 10-13 into patent-eligible subject matter.
Claims 1 and 5-13 are therefore not drawn to patent-eligible subject matter as they are directed to an abstract idea without significantly more.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 1, 5, and 10-13 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Da He et al, “A Heuristic Energy-Aware Approach for Hard Real-Time Systems on Multi-core Platforms,” Digital System Design (DSD), 2012 15th Euromicro Conference, September 5, 2012, pages 288-295, hereinafter He.
He was cited in the IDS filed on 06/23/2023.
As per claim 1, He teaches the limitations as claimed, including a computer-implemented method of scheduling periodic tasks on a group of multi-core processors, the method comprising:
defining as a combinatorial optimization problem a function of assigning, among a group of M processing devices, a set of tasks T for execution, using an objective function optimizing the power consumption of said processing devices when executing subsets of said tasks T (Page 290, Section C, Section IV), with a constraint that, for each processing device, a total utilization of a task subset assigned to the respective processing device, when executing on said processing device, is lower than a threshold, said threshold depending on the number of processor cores of said respective processing device (Page 290, Col. 2, “After a task is selected…”; Page 291, Col. 1);
applying a heuristic algorithm to generate a solution to the defined combinatorial optimization problem (Page 290, Section IV, “In this section we propose a Simulated Annealing (SA) based heuristic algorithm to solve the Problem 1”); and
commanding the scheduling, on each of the processing devices, of the task subset assigned to the respective processing device by the solution generated by the heuristic algorithm (Page 291, Section V).
As per claim 5, He teaches that the scheduling of the assigned task subset is performed using a global earliest deadline first algorithm (Page 294, “In each test scenario we applied EDF as real-time task schedule on each core”).
As per claim 10, it is a system claim with no further limitations beyond those rejected above. Therefore, it is rejected for the same reasons.
As per claim 11, it is a server claim with no further limitations beyond those rejected above. Therefore, it is rejected for the same reasons.
As per claims 12 and 13, they are medium claims with no further limitations beyond those rejected above. Therefore, they are rejected for the same reasons.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 2-4 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Gregory Kessler whose telephone number is (571)270-7762. The examiner can normally be reached M-Th 8:30 - 5, Alternate Fridays 8:30-4.
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/GREGORY A KESSLER/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2197