Non-Final Office 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 .
Election/Restrictions
Restriction to one of the following inventions is required under 35 U.S.C. 121:
I. Claims 1-14, drawn to failure of a computer and failover to another computer, classified in G06F 11/2028.
II. Claims 15-20, drawn to simulation of a second computer, classified in G06F 30/20.
Inventions I and II are related as subcombinations disclosed as usable together in a single combination. The subcombinations are distinct if they do not overlap in scope and are not obvious variants, and if it is shown that at least one subcombination is separately usable. In the instant case, subcombination II has separate utility such as system design and optimization. See MPEP § 806.05(d).
The examiner has required restriction between subcombinations usable together. Where applicant elects a subcombination and claims thereto are subsequently found allowable, any claim(s) depending from or otherwise requiring all the limitations of the allowable subcombination will be examined for patentability in accordance with 37 CFR 1.104. See MPEP § 821.04(a). Applicant is advised that if any claim presented in a divisional application is anticipated by, or includes all the limitations of, a claim that is allowable in the present application, such claim may be subject to provisional statutory and/or nonstatutory double patenting rejections over the claims of the instant application.
During a telephone conversation with David Britton on November 17, 2025 a provisional election was made to prosecute the invention of Group I, claims 1-14. Affirmation of this election must be made by applicant in replying to this Office action. Claims 15-20 are withdrawn from further consideration by the examiner, 37 CFR 1.142(b), as being drawn to a non-elected invention.
Priority
Applicant’s claim for the benefit of a prior-filed application under 35 U.S.C. 119(e) or under 35 U.S.C. 120, 121, 365(c), or 386(c) is acknowledged. Applicant has not complied with one or more conditions for receiving the benefit of an earlier filing date under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) as follows:
The later-filed application must be an application for a patent for an invention which is also disclosed in the prior application (the parent or original nonprovisional application or provisional application). The disclosure of the invention in the parent application and in the later-filed application must be sufficient to comply with the requirements of 35 U.S.C. 112(a) or the first paragraph of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, except for the best mode requirement. See Transco Products, Inc. v. Performance Contracting, Inc., 38 F.3d 551, 32 USPQ2d 1077 (Fed. Cir. 1994).
The disclosure of the prior-filed application, Application No. 63/537,993, fails to provide adequate support or enablement in the manner provided by 35 U.S.C. 112(a) or pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, first paragraph for one or more claims of this application.
With respect to claim 6, the provisional application does not provide support for the limitations: the operations further comprising: determining a first output of the input-output module at a start of the third time period; and determining an initial action predicted to produce a second output that satisfies a similarity criterion with the first output when the initial action is performed by the input-output module.
With respect to claim 7, the provisional application does not provide support for the limitations: the operations further comprising predicting a fault in the first isolated compute environment.
With respect to claim 13, the provisional application does not provide support for the limitations: determining a first output of the input-output module at the start of the third time period; and determining an initial action predicted to produce a second output that satisfies a similarity criterion with the first output when the initial action is performed by the input-output module.
With respect to claim 14, the provisional application does not provide support for the limitations: predicting a fault in the first isolated compute environment.
Accordingly, claims 6, 7, 13, and 14 are not entitled to the benefit of the prior application.
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 1-7 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter. The claim(s) does/do not fall within at least one of the four categories of patent eligible subject matter because claims 1-7 are not limited to non-transitory, tangible embodiments. In view of Applicant's disclosure, specification para. [0104], the memory is not limited to tangible, non-transitory embodiments, instead being defined as including both tangible, non-transitory embodiments (e.g., hard disk, RAM, ROM) and intangible, transitory embodiments (e.g., one or more devices for storing data/and or computer code and any other suitable memory for storing software objects and/or computer instructions). As such, the claim is not limited to statutory subject matter and is therefore non-statutory. The Examiner recommends amending the claim to include “non-transitory”.
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.
Claim(s) 1-3, 7-10, and 14 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Chilamakuri et al., US 2022/0027215 A1, and further in view of Wang et al., US 10,176,033 B1.
Referring to claim 1:
In para. 0090, Chilamakuri et al. disclose one or more memory devices having instructions stored thereon executed by one or more processors.
In para. 0019, Chilamakuri et al. disclose operating a first isolated compute environment (an event server) during a first time period to perform a first set of calculations and send results of the first set of calculations (notifies the central management server). However, Chilamakuri et al. do not explicitly disclose the set of calculations are related to control of a building. In col. 10, lines 17-30, Wang et al. disclose a building management system which is a control system installed in a building that monitors various systems and sensors. A large scale event detection system gathers data from the building management system. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill at the time of filing of the invention to include the building management system of Wang et al. into the event server system of Chilamakuri et al. A person of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to make the modification because Chilamakuri et al. disclose event servers for detecting events similar to the large scale event detection system of Wang et al. The building events of Wang et al. could be events that are detected by Chilamakuri et al. and the combination would yield predictable results. Further, the fault tolerance of Chilamakuri et al. would be beneficial to the system of Wang et al. in order to prevent catastrophic failure at a building when a control system fails.
In para. 0021, Chilamakuri et al. disclose operating an additional plurality of isolated compute environments to, in combination, perform a second set of calculations related to the control of the building and send results of the second set of calculations (multiple event servers can be instantiated to receive events, the event servers are independent).
In para. 0019 and 0040, Chilamakuri et al. disclose operating a second isolated compute environment to store the results of the first set of calculations and the results of the second set of calculations (0019: when an event server detects the occurrence of an event, the event server can notify the central management server, 0040: events are stored in a registry).
In para. 0024, Chilamakuri et al. disclose instructing a failover set of isolated compute environments from the additional plurality of isolated compute environments to perform the first set of calculations during a second time period in response to the first isolated compute environment encountering a failure when performing the first set of calculations during the first time period (events that were registered with the failed event server can be remapped to an active event server).
Referring to claims 2 and 9, in para. 0024, Chilamakuri et al. disclose wherein the second time period comprises a duration of at least one of: the failure of the first isolated compute environment. In para. 0023 and 0025, Chilamakuri et al. disclose wherein the second time period comprises a duration of at least one of a restart of the first isolated compute environment (0023: restarting a failed event server, 0025: active server temporarily processes events).
Referring to claims 3 and 10, in para. 0019 and 0040, Chilamakuri et al. disclose wherein the first isolated compute environment and the failover set of isolated compute environments store the results of the first set of calculations and the results of the second set of calculations in the second isolated compute environment when performing the first set of calculations and the second set of calculations (0019: when an event server detects the occurrence of an event, the event server can notify the central management server, 0040: events are stored in a registry).
Referring to claims 7 and 14, in para. 0020, Chilamakuri et al. disclose detecting that an event server fails. However, Chilamakuri et al. do not explicitly disclose the operations further comprising predicting a fault in the first isolated compute environment. In col. 13, lines 5-15, Wang et al. disclose status information of a host computing system such as temperatures in excess of a safe temperature may be a predictor that the host is about to fail. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill at the time of filing of the invention to include the fault predictor of Wang et al. into the event servers of Chilamakuri et al. A person of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to make the modification because predicting a failure before it occurs is proactive instead of reactive. This allows graceful failover to occur rather than waiting for complete failure of the event server, which can be catastrophic.
Referring to claim 8:
In para. 0019, Chilamakuri et al. disclose operating a first isolated compute environment (an event server) during a first time period to perform a first set of calculations and send results of the first set of calculations (notifies the central management server). However, Chilamakuri et al. do not explicitly disclose the set of calculations are related to control of a building. In col. 10, lines 17-30, Wang et al. disclose a building management system which is a control system installed in a building that monitors various systems and sensors. A large scale event detection system gathers data from the building management system. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill at the time of filing of the invention to include the building management system of Wang et al. into the event server system of Chilamakuri et al. A person of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to make the modification because Chilamakuri et al. disclose event servers for detecting events similar to the large scale event detection system of Wang et al. The building events of Wang et al. could be events that are detected by Chilamakuri et al. and the combination would yield predictable results. Further, the fault tolerance of Chilamakuri et al. would be beneficial to the system of Wang et al. in order to prevent catastrophic failure at a building when a control system fails.
In para. 0021, Chilamakuri et al. disclose operating an additional plurality of isolated compute environments to, in combination, perform a second set of calculations related to the control of the building and send results of the second set of calculations (multiple event servers can be instantiated to receive events, the event servers are independent).
In para. 0019 and 0040, Chilamakuri et al. disclose operating a second isolated compute environment to store the results of the first set of calculations and the results of the second set of calculations (0019: when an event server detects the occurrence of an event, the event server can notify the central management server, 0040: events are stored in a registry).
In para. 0024, Chilamakuri et al. disclose instructing a failover set of isolated compute environments from the additional plurality of isolated compute environments to perform the first set of calculations during a second time period in response to the first isolated compute environment encountering a failure when performing the first set of calculations during the first time period (events that were registered with the failed event server can be remapped to an active event server).
Claim(s) 4 and 11 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over the combination of Chilamakuri et al., US 2022/0027215 A1 and Wang et al., US 10,176,033 B1 as applied to claims 1 and 8 above, and further in view of Whitehouse et al., “Amazon Web Services: Enabling Cost-Efficient Disaster Recovery Leveraging Cloud Infrastructure”.
Referring to claims 4 and 11, in para. 0040, Chilamakuri et al. disclose storing event data in a registry or repository (wherein the second isolated compute environment is configured to store calculations inside the second isolated compute environment). However, neither Chilamakuri et al. nor Wang et al. explicitly disclose storing calculations inside a database management system, wherein the operations further comprise recreating the second isolated compute environment using the database management system in response to an outage of the second isolated compute environment. On page 3, Whitehouse et al. disclose using the cloud for disaster recovery. On pages 10-11, Whitehouse et al. disclose Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS for backing up data and reconstituting applications. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill at the time of filing of the invention to include the Amazon disaster recovery web services of Whitehouse et al. into the combined system of Chilamakuri et al. and Wang et al. A person of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to make the modification because disaster recovery using the cloud enables recovery from storage faults and corrupted data (see Whitehouse et al.: page 3, Risks are Abundant). Further, with cloud-based computing and storage, organizations have access to a DR platform without building one. They don’t need additional corporate-owned infrastructure assets like servers and storage arrays, and they can leverage massive deployments that provide economies of scale to benefit all subscribers, whether the cloud is hosted in house or with a service provider. Redundancy can be automatic, with stored objects replicated across multiple geographies without significant additional cost (see Whitehouse et al.: page 7).
Claim(s) 12 is/are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over the combination of Chilamakuri et al., US 2022/0027215 A1 and Wang et al., US 10,176,033 B1 as applied to claim 8 above, and further in view of Llopis et al., US 2021/0190354 A1.
Referring to claim 12, in col. 10, lines 17-26, Wang et al. disclose a building management system that controls a building’s mechanical, environmental, and electrical equipment (applying outputs to the building with an input-output module). However, neither Chilamakuri et al. nor Wang et al. explicitly disclose determining a start of a third time period during which the input-output module was not applying the outputs. In para. 0097, Llopis et al. disclose a fault detection system may detect the beginning and end of faults in automated industrial equipment, computer networks, data centers, and manufacturing systems. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill at the time of filing of the invention to include the fault detection system of Llopis et al. into the combined system of Chilamakuri et al. and Wang et al. A person of ordinary skill in the art would have been motivated to make the modification because it may be important for building managers to accurately identify time periods in which faults occurred that may have caused building equipment to operate improperly. Such faults may cause buildings to utilize more energy or for other aspects of the buildings to be affected such as their security systems. Building managers may use fault data to diagnose problems that occurred in their building systems (see Llopis: para. 0002).
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 5 and 6 are not rejected under prior art.
Claim 13 is 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.
With respect to claim 5, the prior art does not teach or reasonably suggest, in combination with the remaining limitations, operating the second isolated compute environment to receive measurements from an input-output module; operating the first isolated compute environment to send commands to the input-output module to apply to the building; and operating the first isolated compute environment to receive, from the input-output module, a third time period for which it was not applying the commands.
With respect to claim 13, the prior art does not teach or reasonably suggest, in combination with the remaining limitations, determining a first output of the input-output module at the start of the third time period; and determining an initial action predicted to produce a second output that satisfies a similarity criterion with the first output when the initial action is performed by the input-output module.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to MICHAEL C MASKULINSKI whose telephone number is (571)272-3649. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 8:00 am-5:00 pm.
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/MICHAEL MASKULINSKI/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2113