Patent decision
- BL number
- O/392/16
- Concerning rights in
- GB 1216858.9
- Hearing Officer
- Mr B Micklewright
- Decision date
- 12 August 2016
- Person(s) or Company(s) involved
- The Boeing Company
- Provisions discussed
- Patents Act 1977, section 1(1), 1(2), 3
- Keywords
- Excluded fields (refused), Inventive step
- Related Decisions
- None
Summary
The application related to analysing maintenance data for vehicles, in particular aircraft. It involved analysing maintenance actions which correspond to a fault message relating to the vehicle and identifying corrective actions. This information was stored so that it may be retrieved when diagnosing future fault messages. The system inferred that the last corrective action (i.e. the most recent action) associated with a maintenance event was the action which fixed the fault. The hearing officer found that the invention was excluded from patentability as a program for a computer as such and a method of doing business as such. He also found that it lacked an inventive step over two prior art documents. The application was therefore refused.
Full decision O/392/16 
114Kb
