Patent decision

BL number

O/152/06

Concerning rights in

GB2381884

Hearing Officer

Mr S Probert

Decision date

13 June 2006

Person(s) or Company(s) involved

Mr Pablo Cappellini

Provisions discussed

PA1977 section 1(2)(c). Article 52 EPC

Keywords

Excluded fields (refused)

Related Decisions

None

Summary

The invention is a system for planning and varying the route(s) that carriers should take when delivering packages. More specifically, it teaches that each carrier in the system can be instructed to deviate from the originally planned route to a predetermined extent. By allowing each carrier in the network to deviate in this way, added capability is built into the system because eg. two carriers (who wouldn’t normally have met) can be diverted from their routes by a short distance to enable them to meet at a new “relay point” in order to exchange one or more packages.

The Hearing Officer considered that in principle the invention is very similar to the sort of mental processes that friends and relatives follow in order to transfer items among themselves on an ad-hoc basis. Although the invention uses a computer to work out the route deviations, that is simply to enable the system to cope with the vastly increased complexity of a national freight carrier network such as FedEx®, UPS®, TNT® etc.. The primary difference was one of scale, and the use of a programmed computer to cope with the increased complexity.

Full decision O/152/06 48Kb