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 .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
Claim(s) 1, 6-10 and 15-18 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over BOND (US PUBLICATION 20120079490) in view of ANDOH (US PATENT 5594901)
In regards to claim 1, BOND teaches A computer-implemented method for processing a software application workflow, the method comprising: receiving, by a workflow engine of a computing device, a workflow configuration defining the software application workflow (P. 0024) “FIG. 3 illustrates an example method 300, which can be used as a distributed workflow system that uses loosely coupled computation of stateless nodes to bring computation tasks to the compute nodes.” (P. 0025-0026) “A directed acyclic graph representing dependencies between work units is referred to as a work unit context. This graph expresses allowable parallelism between unrelated work units.” including a plurality of nodes and a plurality of connections between the nodes, each of the plurality of nodes being associated with a corresponding software processing task, (P. 0026) “The vertices of the directed acyclic graph represent work units in which information and work flows in a consistent direction through the job. Thus, the directed acyclic graph represents at least a partial ordering of the work units.” (P. 0025) “A work unit is a unit of work that can be scheduled for execution on a worker. The work unit can represent a managed assembly/object reference with associated parameters, or a child process to spawn.” determining, by the workflow engine, a first set of nodes of the plurality of nodes to be executed based on the workflow configuration and the plurality of connections; (P. 0024) “The distributed and decentralized workers query the directed acyclic graph for work units ready for execution based upon the directed acyclic graph at 304.” executing, by the computing device, the software processing tasks associated with the first set of nodes to generate an execution result comprising output from the software processing tasks associated with the first set of nodes; (P. 0030) “The worker 410 executes the work unit until it is executed, cancelled, or has failed.” (P. 0032) “The finished state at 506 represents an acceptably executed work unit. The cancelled state at 508 represents a work unit that has been stopped for some reason. The failed state at 510 represents an unacceptably executed work unit.” determining, by the workflow engine, a second set of nodes of the plurality of nodes to be executed based on the workflow configuration, the plurality of connections, and the execution result; (P. 0031) “The work flow engine looks at the results generated by the second and third work units and determines whether they are acceptable. If they are acceptable, the work flow engine reports success back to the work balancer application and the first work unit completes successful. If the results are unacceptable, however, the work flow engine can create one or more new work units, that perform tasks such as creating a trouble ticket for the system administrator or re-scheduling the second and third work units to re-run against updated data.”
However, BOND does not teach the workflow configuration further including a parallel flag for each of the plurality of nodes; and executing in parallel, by the computing device, the software processing tasks associated with the second set of nodes. ANDOH teaches the workflow configuration further including a parallel flag for each of the plurality of nodes; (Columns 9-10, Lines 64-17) “In FIG. 5, when execution is commanded for a job step permitting parallel execution while another job step in the common job is already executed, designation is made such as "PARALLEL=YES". On the other hand, when the parallel execution is not permitted, designation is made such as "PARALLEL=NO".” and executing in parallel, by the computing device, the software processing tasks associated with the second set of nodes. (Column 12-13, Lines 60-8) “When the parallel execution is designated as checked at the judgement step S15, the job step execution commanding portion 14 commands to the job step initiating portion 15 to initiate execution of the program designated by the execution command for the job step.”
It would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to incorporate Andoh’s known per step parallel execution designation into the DAG-based work unit scheduling of Bond.
In regards to claim 6, ANDOH teaches wherein determining the second set of nodes results in ending the workflow such that no further software processing tasks associated with the workflow are executed by the computing device. (Column 20, Lines 46-60) “designation to forcedly terminate the other job steps to terminate the job as an operation upon abnormal termination of the job step, can be contained in the job step execution command.”
It would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to apply Andoh’s forced termination upon abnormal result designation to Bonds result conditioned second set determination mechanism in order to terminate a job as appropriate.
In regards to claim 7, ANDOH teaches wherein the computing device executes in parallel only the software processing tasks associated with nodes in the second set of nodes that have a parallel flag set to active. (Columns 9-10, Lines 64-17) “In FIG. 5, when execution is commanded for a job step permitting parallel execution while another job step in the common job is already executed, designation is made such as "PARALLEL=YES". On the other hand, when the parallel execution is not permitted, designation is made such as "PARALLEL=NO".” (Column 12-13, Lines 60-8) “When the parallel execution is designated as checked at the judgement step S15, the job step execution commanding portion 14 commands to the job step initiating portion 15 to initiate execution of the program designated by the execution command for the job step.”
It would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to incorporate Andoh’s per-step parallel execution designation into the DAG based work unit scheduling of Bond in order to execute a jobs in parallel or not.
In regards to claim 8, ANDOH teaches, wherein the computing device sequentially executes the software processing tasks associated with nodes in the second set of nodes that have a parallel flag set to inactive. (Columns 9-10, Lines 64-17) “In FIG. 5, when execution is commanded for a job step permitting parallel execution while another job step in the common job is already executed, designation is made such as "PARALLEL=YES". On the other hand, when the parallel execution is not permitted, designation is made such as "PARALLEL=NO".” (Column 12, Lines 47-59) “When the parallel execution is not designated as checked at the judgement step S15, the job step execution commanding portion 14 retrieves other job in waiting state for termination of the currently executed job step with reference to the job execution information in the job execution information storage portion 12 to notice that the job step can be executed (process step S16). Subsequently, the job step execution commanding portion 14 sets the information indicative of the waiting state of the executable state in the job execution information in the job execution information storage portion 12 to wait for termination of the currently executed job step”
Same obviousness rejection set forth in claim 7.
In regards to claim 9, BOND teaches wherein the workflow configuration comprises a Directed Acrylic Graph (DAG) data structure. (P. 0026) “A directed acyclic graph, often abbreviated as DAG, is a directed graph with no directed cycles. That is, it is formed by a collection of vertices and directed edges, each edge connecting a vertex to another, such that there is no way to start at any selected vertex in the graph and follow a sequence of edges that eventually loops back to the selected vertex. The vertices of the directed acyclic graph represent work units in which information and work flows in a consistent direction through the job. Thus, the directed acyclic graph represents at least a partial ordering of the work units.”
Claims 10 and 15-18 are rejected for the same reasons set forth above as they correspond to claims 1 and 6-9.
Claim 5 and 14 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over BOND (US PUBLICATION 20120079490) in view of ANDOH (US PATENT 5594901) further in view of IADA (US PUBLICATION 20010056458)
In regards to claim 5, IADA teaches wherein determining the second set of nodes results in skipping one or more of the plurality of nodes in the workflow such that the software processing tasks associated with the skipped nodes are not executed by the computing device. (P. 0055) “when the designation "SKIP=YES" (see 202 in FIG. 2) indicating that a given job step is to be skipped without executing it is contained in the execute statement "EXEC", then data "YES" indicating the skip designation is placed at a location allocated to the given step in the step management table 520 (FIG. 4). (See a step 322 in FIG. 7.)”
It would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to incorporate Iada’s skip designation into the combination of Bond and Andoh to skip processing of certain jobs.
Claim 14 is rejected for the same reason set forth above as it corresponds to claim 5
Claim(s) 2-4 and 11-13 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over BOND (US PUBLICATION 20120079490) in view of ANDOH (US PATENT 5594901) further in view of Manju (Topological Sorting CS 560 Illinois Institute of Technology)
In regards to claim 2, Manju teaches wherein the workflow engine determines the first set of nodes using Kahn’s algorithm. (Algorithms for Topological Sorting, Sec. 1) “The very first algorithm was written by Kahn (1969) [7] in this algorithm (lift from Wikipedia). In this algorithm, the sorted order is started by accessing the nodes in the graph which do not have any incoming edges.”
It would have been obvious for one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date to implement Bonds disclosed node selection function using Kahns algorithm, since Manju establishes it as a well-known, standard technique for precisely this purpose, to order the execution of nodes with a reasonable expectation of success and predictable results.
In regards to claim 3, Manju teaches wherein the workflow engine determines the second set of nodes using a breadth-first search. (Algorithms for Topological Sorting, Sec. 1) “This algorithm uses a breadth first search. This technique finds the shortest path solution from start to end.”
Refer to claim 2 for the motivation to combine.
In regards to claim 4, Manju teaches wherein the breadth-first search identifies one or more nodes adjacent to the first set of nodes using the connections and assigns the adjacent nodes as the second set of nodes. (Algorithms for Topological Sorting, Sec. 1) “The vertices on the outgoing edge are considered and that edge is removed. That node is checked again for anymore incoming edges, if there are none it is inserted into the set of sorted elements. The algorithm is as follows L ← Empty list that will contain the sorted elements S ← Set of all nodes with no incoming edges while S is non-empty do remove a node n from S insert n into L for each node m with an edge e from n to m do remove edge e from the graph if m has no other incoming edges then insert m into S if graph has edges then return error (graph has at least one cycle) else return L (a topologically sorted order)”
Refer to claim 2 for the motivation to combine.
Claims 11-13 are rejected for the same reasons set forth above as they correspond to claim 2-4.
Conclusion
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/SELMAN MOHAMED ABDULLAHI/Examiner, Art Unit 2199
/LEWIS A BULLOCK JR/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2199
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