US 10778363

I'll search for current information on this patent, including any 2026 CAFC docket activity.

US 10,778,363 B2 — Verification Summary

Search performed: USPTO/Google Patents full text (provided, authoritative), PATENTSCOPE/Unified Patents portal, USPTO PTAB (PTABCTS), uspto.report, and CAFC docket search.

Bibliographic data

Abstract (verbatim): "Systems and methods are provided for decentralized rail signaling and positive train control. A decentralized train control system may include a plurality of wayside units, configured for placement on or near tracks in a railway network, and one or more train-mounted units, each configured for use in a train operating in a railway network that support use of the decentralized train control system. Each train-mounted unit may configured to receive communicate with any wayside unit and/or train-mounted unit that comes within range, with the communicating including use of ultra-wideband (UWB) signals, and for generating control information based on the UWB signals, for use in controlling one or more functions associated with operation of the train."

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

⚠️ Uncertainty flag — read first. The authoritative full text supplied to me (Google Patents) was truncated in the "Description" section and did not include the claims. I therefore cannot quote the granted claims verbatim from the primary source. The following is reconstructed from two secondary sources and should be treated as provisional:

1. Claim 1 (system). A system for providing decentralized control operations in a railway network, comprising:

   • (1A) a plurality of wayside units, each configured for placement on or near tracks in the railway network;
   • (1B) one or more train-mounted units, each configured for deployment on a train operating in the railway network;
   • (1C) each train-mounted unit configured to (i) communicate with any wayside unit or other train-mounted unit that comes within communication range, the communicating comprising use of ultra-wideband (UWB) based signals, and (ii) generate, based on the communication, control information for controlling one or more functions of the train;
   • (1D) wherein generating the control information comprises or is based on obtaining ranging measurements;
   • (1E) wherein obtaining the ranging measurements comprises: broadcasting UWB signals within wireless range of the train-mounted unit, the UWB signals comprising information identifying the train-mounted unit; selecting, based on received responses to the broadcast, one or more of the plurality of wayside units; and determining ranging information corresponding to each selected wayside unit based on UWB signals communicated with each of those units.

   Source: petition excerpts in IPR2023-00452 quoting claim 1 of U.S. Patent No. 10,778,363 ([1PRE]–[1E4] limitation-by-limitation chart), USPTO PTAB document repository.

2. Another independent claim. A device/system cast from the perspective of the train-mounted device — antennas for transmitting/receiving wireless signals plus circuits configured to process signals/data and perform functions within the decentralized train control system, communicating with any wayside unit and/or other train-mounted unit within range using UWB-based signals, and generating control information therefrom.

3. A further independent claim. A wayside device configured for placement on or near tracks, that communicates with any train-mounted unit that comes within range, the communicating comprising transmission/reception of UWB-based signals.

Important caveat on claim 2/3 above: the "train-mounted device" and "wayside device" independent-claim texts I located appear on the Google Patents page for US 2019/0263432 A1 (application 16/055,905, a sibling/CIP), which shows 20 claims with claim 1 = train-mounted device and claim 20 = system. Because claim 1 of the granted 10,778,363 is the system claim (per the IPR petition), the granted patent's claim set and numbering differ from that sibling publication. I cannot confirm from the sources retrieved whether 10,778,363 has three independent claims or how they are numbered. Dependent claims of the granted patent are documented in the IPR petition chart (e.g., claim 2 — control information from sources other than UWB; claim 5 — non-UWB communication; claim 13/14 — absolute position determination; etc.), but the independent-claim count remains unverified.

Litigation / PTAB / CAFC status as of April 26, 2026

• CAFC 2026 dockets: My search returned no Federal Circuit docket or appeal activity for 10,778,363. I cannot rule out an unreported or very recent docket; treat this as "none found," not "none exists."
• PTAB: IPR2023-00452, petitioners Siemens Mobility, Inc.; Ground Transportation Systems USA, Inc.; Humatics Corp.; and Piper Networks, Inc. v. Metrom Rail, LLC, Patent No. 10,778,363 — filed but Not Instituted (procedural).
• District court (still active in 2026):
  • D. Del. 1:23-cv-00314, Metrom Rail, LLC v. Ground Transportation Systems USA Inc. et al. (asserting 10,179,595; 10,737,709; 10,778,363; 8,812,227; 9,043,131)
  • S.D.N.Y. 1:23-cv-03057 (Siemens Mobility, Inc.); S.D.N.Y. 1:23-cv-02920; D. Del. 1:22-cv-00049
  • Law360 (May 21, 2026): Piper Networks was denied its motion to exit the S.D.N.Y. infringement suit brought by Metrom Rail over its train-safety patents, the court finding the complaint gave proper notice of the infringement claims.

Data conflicts noted (no auto-correction applied)

The Unified Patents portal lists this patent's priority as 2017-08-03, application date 2019-07-17, grant 2020-09-14, and expiration 2038-08-05 — each exactly one day earlier than the Google Patents/USPTO bibliographic data (2017-08-04 / 2019-07-18 / 2020-09-15 / 2038-08-06). This is most likely a time-zone rendering artifact in the third-party aggregator; I have reported the primary-source dates above without altering either.

Related family members (same title)

US 11,349,589 B2 (issued 2022-05-31) and US 11,700,075 B2 (issued 2023-07-11), both Metrom Rail, LLC and both claiming the 2017-08-04 priority.

I'll research litigation involving US Patent 10,778,363 (Metrom Rail LLC). Let me start with the sources you suggested and the case numbers flagged on the patent record.

Let me dig into the specific 2023 cases and PTAB proceedings.

Litigation Involving U.S. Patent No. 10,778,363 ("the '363 patent")

Patent owner / plaintiff: Metrom Rail, LLC (Lakemoor, IL) — assignee of record.
Patent: U.S. 10,778,363 B2, "Methods and systems for decentralized rail signaling and positive train control," priority Aug. 4, 2017, granted Sept. 15, 2020 (source: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US10778363](/patent/US10778363)/en).

The '363 patent has been asserted in a coordinated family of infringement suits brought by Metrom Rail against vendors of UWB-based train-control systems for the MTA New York City Transit "Pilot"/signal-modernization work. It has also been the subject of one PTAB petition. A separate, later Metrom case (the MBTA case) and the PTAB/Federal Circuit litigation concerning the '131, '227 and '738 patents do not involve the '363 patent — I flag those separately at the end so they are not confused with '363 activity.

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1. Metrom Rail, LLC v. Siemens Mobility, Inc., et al. — D. Del. (originally filed)

This was the lead case. Metrom alleged the defendants infringed its UWB patents through the MTA NYC Transit UWB "Pilot" project. In a March 30, 2023 Memorandum Order the court granted in part and denied in part the defendants' motions to dismiss: direct-infringement claims against Humatics and Piper were dismissed; the tortious-interference claim was held preempted as to Humatics, Piper and Thales; the case was then severed into two (Siemens + Humatics, and Thales/GTS + Piper). Judge Andrews ruled that "one case will be against Siemens and Humatics; the other against Thales and Piper."

• Sources: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[9635981](/patent/9635981)/metrom-rail-llc-v-siemens-mobility-inc/ ; https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.77707/gov.uscourts.ded.77707.51.0.pdf ; RPX: https://insight.rpxcorp.com/litigation/dedce-77707-metrom-rail-v-siemens-mobility ; Complaint analysis: https://ai-lab-cl-prod.azurewebsites.net/case/dct/ded/1:23-cv-00314/doc/analysis/9

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2. Metrom Rail, LLC v. Siemens Mobility, Inc. (et al.) — S.D.N.Y. (severed case)

The Second Amended Complaint was filed May 26, 2023 (D.I. 69-1). The court later stayed the case in its entirety (including the non-patent Count IV), reasoning that the PTAB validity determinations would simplify the issues and that the case was at an early stage.

• Sources: https://unicourt.com/case/pc-db5-casegu6769ebb1557f-[1460397](/patent/1460397) ; https://dockets.justia.com/docket/new-york/nysdce/1:2023cv03057/[597086](/patent/597086) ; stay opinion: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/[9891071](/patent/9891071)/metrom-rail-llc-v-siemens-mobility-inc/

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3. Metrom Rail, LLC v. Ground Transportation Systems USA Inc. (n/k/a Hitachi Rail GTS USA Inc.), et al. — D. Del. → S.D.N.Y. (severed case)

The complaint-analysis record expressly maps Claim 1 of the '363 patent element-by-element to the accused MTA UWB system ("beacons"/"anchors" and train-mounted UWB "nodes"), so this case squarely involves the '363 patent.

• Sources: https://dockets.justia.com/docket/new-york/nysdce/1:2023cv02920/[596855](/patent/596855) ; https://services.patexia.com/lawsuits/Metrom-Rail-LLC-v-Hitachi-Rail-GTS-USA-Inc-et-al-id-[188184](/patent/188184) ; https://ai-lab-cl-prod.azurewebsites.net/case/dct/nysd/1:23-cv-02920/doc/analysis/9 ; patent/litigation table: https://goldencompass.patentpia.com/en/report/reportResult.hs?INPUTITEM_VARSET=TECHCATE&LANG=EN&LOCALE=US&MENUID_3DEPTH=M3_TechCate_2_17_X&TECHCATE=83002&UI_LANG=EN

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4. PTAB — Siemens Mobility, Inc. et al. v. Metrom Rail, LLC (IPR against the '363 patent)

The Google Patents litigation tab for US 10,778,363 lists this IPR as filed and "Not Instituted – Procedural," and the PTAB docket shows the Patent Owner's disclaimer and the petitioner's refund request.

• Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10778363/en (litigation section) ; https://services.patexia.com/lawsuits/Siemens-Mobility-Inc-et-al-v-Metrom-Rail-LLC-id-[185210](/patent/185210)/documents/sort_by/created/sort_dir/desc

Caveat: I could not independently confirm from a primary PTAB document which single patent IPR2023-00452 targeted; the association with the '363 patent comes from the Google Patents litigation listing for that patent. The 2023 IPRs that produced substantive decisions — IPR2023-00468 ('131 patent) and IPR2024-00947 ('738 patent) — were directed to other Metrom patents, not the '363 patent.

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Related activity that does NOT involve the '363 patent (listed to avoid confusion)

• Metrom Rail, LLC v. Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (and Piper Networks), originally D. Mass., transferred to S.D.N.Y. 1:25-cv-10417-DLC (Judge Denise L. Cote); original complaint filed May 21, 2025. This case asserts the '738 patent (9,731,738) and the '131 patent — not the '363 patent. Latest reported developments (per CourtListener): Piper's March 6, 2026 motion to dismiss denied in part (the '738 claim survives; the '131 claim dismissed as moot), and a June 4, 2026 order staying the case pending the Federal Circuit's decision on the '131 patent. Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72043751/metrom-rail-llc-v-massachusetts-bay-transportation-authority/
• Federal Circuit appeal No. 24-2223, Metrom Rail, LLC v. Siemens Mobility, Inc. (decided May 11, 2026) — affirming-in-part/reversing-in-part the PTAB's obviousness findings on the '131 and '227 patents (not the '363 patent). Source: https://www.vitallaw.com/news/patent-fed-cir-ptab-s-invalidation-of-railroad-collision-avoidance-patent-claims-affirmed-surviving-claims-also-obvious/ipm0139724f39c7384235bd25d80517150a21
• IPR2023-00468 ('131 patent) and IPR2024-00947 ('738 patent) — other Metrom patents, not the '363 patent. (McAndrews reported a Nov. 20, 2024 denial of institution on the '738 patent.)

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Summary of '363-patent exposure

The '363 patent was asserted by Metrom Rail in four district-court actions (1:22-cv-00049 (D. Del.), and the three severed/transferred cases 1:23-cv-03057 (S.D.N.Y.), 1:23-cv-02920 (S.D.N.Y., transferred from D. Del. 1:23-cv-00314)) against Siemens Mobility, Ground Transportation Systems USA/Hitachi Rail GTS USA, Humatics and Piper Networks — all arising from the MTA NYC Transit UWB signaling contracts. It was also the target of IPR2023-00452, which was not instituted. The severed cases are or were stayed pending PTAB review of the related '131/'227/'738 patents.

Caveats / uncertainties:

• Some sources use different naming (e.g., "Thales" → "Ground Transportation Systems USA" → "Hitachi Rail GTS USA"; "Piper Networks"), so captions for the same case vary across databases.
• I do not have confirmed current (2026) dockets for every '363-asserting district-court case, nor a confirmed final disposition (settlement, dismissal, judgment) for any of them; I would verify current status directly on PACER/RPX before relying on it.
• Google Patents' legal-status field lists the '363 patent as "Expired – Fee Related," and Unified Patents indicates no lifetime renewal fees paid — Hmm, but please note these legal-status listings are explicitly caveated as assumptions, and I would not treat the '363 patent as lapsed without confirming the maintenance-fee record at the USPTO. If that status is accurate, it would materially affect the ongoing cases.
• The dates in some retrieved documents (e.g., May–June 2026) post-date the April 26, 2026 date you gave; I have reported them as found rather than reinterpreting them.

I'll start by verifying what PTAB activity exists for this patent, since the structured block indicates no ODP-indexed proceedings but the patent's own litigation data references one.

Let me dig deeper into IPR2023-00452 and check for any other proceedings.

Let me confirm which patent IPR2023-00452 challenges and check the related proceedings.

Important reconciliation note before the analysis

The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block says the ODP API returns no AIA trial proceedings for US 10,778,363. That is incomplete. The patent's own Google Patents litigation metadata independently lists a PTAB case, and PTAB docket records confirm it:

"PTAB case IPR2023-00452 filed (Not Instituted - Procedural)" — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/ptab/case/IPR2023-00452

One nuance worth correcting up front: the Google Patents block attributes the source as "'Unified Patents PTAB Data' … licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution..." — that is a data-source attribution, not the petitioner. There is no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, etc.) in the chain. The petitioner is a joint-defense group of Metrom's litigation adversaries. I flag that because it materially changes the strategic read (competitor-funded IPR, not NPE-harassment defense).

Also note: the ODP gap is likely because the proceeding was terminated before institution, so it never matured into an "AIA trial" in the ODP trial dataset. Treat the single entry below as the operative proceeding.

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Proceedings overview

There is exactly one AIA trial proceeding on file against US 10,778,363: IPR2023-00452 (Siemens Mobility et al. v. Metrom Rail). Breakdown: 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 1 institution denied (terminated pre-institution on procedural grounds). Bottom line for a defendant: no claim of the '363 patent has ever been adjudicated by the PTAB. The patent is untested, not hardened — nobody has an FWD to hide behind, and because nothing was ever instituted, no § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches to the prior art in the Siemens petition. That is a defensive opportunity, not a defensive obstacle.

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IPR2023-00452 — Siemens Mobility, Inc., Ground Transportation Systems USA, Inc., Humatics Corp., and Piper Networks, Inc. v. Metrom Rail, LLC

• Type: Inter Partes Review
• Filed: 2023-01-10 (petition per PTAB docket; Notice of Filing Date Accorded 2023-01-19)
• Status: "Not Instituted - Procedural" (verbatim, Google Patents/Unified PTAB data). Plain English: the Board terminated the case before deciding institution, so there is no institution decision, no FWD, and no estoppel.
• Judge panel: Not public. Because no institution decision issued, no merits panel was publicly designated. (The panel that handled the pre-institution POPR is not a merits panel.)
• Petition grounds: The petition text itself was not retrievable, but the exhibit list is a strong indicator: a § 103 obviousness challenge to the '363 claims (I could not confirm the exact claim mapping) built on — US 2015/0329130 (Carlson, i.e., the patent owner's own family), US 2012/0296562, US 2009/0253439 (Gantner), EP 2,571,742 (Ghaly), US 7,725,252 (Heddebaut), US 2016/0046308, US 2007/0293153, US 2013/0138276, US 2015/0097412, US 2010/0235460, US 2010/0039978, US 9,606,217, US 5,452,870, "CCS: A Railway Corridor Control System Utilizing Ultra Wideband Radio Tech," ETSI TR 101 538 V1.1.1 (2012-10), an Int. J. ITS Res. paper on UWB time reversal, and the Declaration of Aron Kain, Ph.D. (Exhibit 1003).
• Institution decision: None. The case died at the POPR stage. Timeline from the docket: POPR filed 2023-04-19; Board order at Paper 10 and Board Exhibit 3001 on 2023-07-14; Petitioner's Request for Refund 2023-07-26, refund approved 2023-07-27.
• Final Written Decision: None issued. No claim of the '363 patent was canceled by the PTAB. I will not attribute any claim-level outcome to this proceeding.
• Settlement / termination: Terminated pre-institution on procedural grounds. The docket shows Patent Owner filed Exhibit 2001, "Disclaimer in Patent," together with its POPR on 2023-04-19 — in IPR practice that exhibit is conventionally a statutory disclaimer under 35 U.S.C. § 253(a). The sequence (PO disclaimer → Board Paper 10 → petitioner refund request/approval) is consistent with the Board terminating as moot after the challenged claims were disclaimed, with the petitioner recovering its post-institution fee. I could not retrieve the text of Paper 10 or Exhibit 2001, and I cannot confirm which specific claims of the '363 patent were disclaimed. Do not assume a full-patent disclaimer — verify the § 253(a) disclaimer in the patent's file wrapper before relying on it.
• Appeal: None. No FWD, nothing to appeal. (The Fed. Cir. No. 24-2223 appeal, decided 2026-05-11, is from the sibling patents — see below — not from IPR2023-00452.)
• Defensive value: Two-edged, and mostly good for a defendant. (1) No claim has been adjudicated, so there is no "claim 1 is dead" argument available for the '363. (2) But because the case was never instituted, the Siemens/GTS/Humatics/Piper petition, its Kain declaration, and its 13-reference art stack are sitting in the public record, ready to be repurposed, with zero estoppel risk. A new defendant can copy that work product, fix whatever prompted the procedural termination, and file fresh. Include Thales USA, Inc. in your privity/RPI analysis — it was named as an RPI in the parallel '227 IPR (IPR2023-00470, Paper 5).

Primary sources:

• IPR2023-00452 docket (documents/exhibits): https://services.patexia.com/lawsuits/Siemens-Mobility-Inc-et-al-v-Metrom-Rail-LLC-id-[185210](/patent/185210)/documents/sort_by/doc_number/sort_dir/asc
• Patent Owner Power of Attorney, IPR2023-00452 (confirms Patent 10,778,363 and PO counsel McAndrews, Held & Malloy): https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabs/public-informations/petitions/[1550896](/patent/1550896)/download-documents
• Portal record: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/ptab/case/IPR2023-00452

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Strategic summary

What is canceled / sustained / untested on the '363 patent. Nothing is canceled; nothing is sustained; the entire claim set of US 10,778,363 is UNTESTED at the PTAB. The only pre-institution termination occurred after the Patent Owner apparently disclaimed claims (Exhibit 2001) — verify scope in the file wrapper. Contrast this with the same-family, same-specification Metrom patents, which have been largely wiped out: in IPR2023-00470, the Board's FWD of 2024-06-18 held all claims 1–28 of US 8,812,227 unpatentable, and the Board held claims 1–16 of US 9,043,131 unpatentable while sustaining claims 17–20 of the '131. On 2026-05-11, the Federal Circuit (No. 24-2223) affirmed the '227 and '131 claims 1–16 holdings and reversed the Board on '131 claims 17–20, holding them obvious too under a corrected construction of "data representing the separation distance." Net: the '227 and '131 are effectively gone. The '363 (earliest priority 2017-08-04, via 62/541,454 → 16/055,905 → 16/290,576 → this continuation) shares the UWB-train-control subject matter and the Carlson lineage — which is why the same petitioner group targeted it — but its later priority date means the '227/'131 Grisham (US 6,759,948) / Nixon / Douglas stack is not directly transferable; the relevant art is the newer set in the '363 petition (Gantner, Ghaly, Heddebaut, ETSI TR 101 538, etc.).

Estoppel landscape. This is the key takeaway. § 315(e)(2) estoppel never attached to anyone on the '363 patent, because estoppel requires a final written decision — and IPR2023-00452 produced none. Siemens Mobility, GTS USA, Humatics, Piper (and Thales USA, as an identified RPI) are not barred from re-asserting the same or different § 102/§ 103 grounds in district court or in a fresh IPR. Likewise, a new defendant unconnected to that group faces no estoppel at all. The full universe of prior art — including every reference in the IPR2023-00452 exhibit list and the '227 IPR's Grisham/Nixon/Douglas stack — remains available. The corollary risk: if Metrom's disclaimed claims are the ones you'd be accused of infringing, the § 253(a) disclaimer makes those claims treated as never having existed, which is a stronger defense than invalidity (no need to prove anything).

Pattern signals. (1) This is a six-petition campaign by a single joint-defense group, not serial trolling: the '227 FWD (IPR2023-00470) records the Patent Owner stating that "IPR2023-00439, IPR2023-00452, IPR2023-00460 and IPR2023-00468 involve the same parties as this proceeding." Siemens/GTS/Humatics/Piper filed across Metrom's five asserted patents (10,778,363; 8,812,227; 9,043,131; 10,737,709; 10,179,595) in parallel with the district court actions. (2) The Patent Owner is not an aggressive PTAB appellant — the only Federal Circuit appeal in this family is from the sibling patents, and Metrom lost on both the main appeal and the cross-appeal. McAndrews, Held & Malloy (PO) and Crowell & Moring / Wolf Greenfield (petitioner) are the recurring counsel. (3) No defensive aggregator appears anywhere in the chain — the funding is competitor-side. (4) Commercial posture: Google Patents lists the '363 as "Expired - Fee Related" (anticipated expiration 2038-08-06), which may blunt damages theories even if liability survived. Also relevant: the underlying suits (D. Del. 1:22-cv-00049, filed 2022-01-13; later transferred/severed to S.D.N.Y. 1:23-cv-02920 and 1:23-cv-03057, plus D. Del. 1:23-cv-00314) remain the live assertion venues.

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Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant and a demand letter cites the '363: there is no PTAB FWD you can point to — do not overstate the record. Instead, (a) pull the § 253(a) "Disclaimer in Patent" (Exhibit 2001, 2023-04-19) from the file wrapper and confirm exactly which claims, if any, were disclaimed; disclaimed claims are treated as never having existed and are a complete defense as to those claims; and (b) mine the IPR2023-00452 exhibit list and the Kain declaration — that is free, pre-vetted invalidity work product with no estoppel attached.
• For the sibling patents, link and quote the dispositions — they are the best available evidence of how this family fares before the PTAB: IPR2023-00470 FWD of 2024-06-18 ("we determine that Petitioner has shown, by a preponderance of the evidence, that claims 1-28 are unpatentable") — https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2023-00470/Siemens_Mobility_Inc._v._Metrom_Rail_LLC/docs/06-18-2024-Board/Final_Written_Decision__original-71-Final_Written_Decision__original.pdf — and the Fed. Cir. No. 24-2223 opinion of 2026-05-11 ("we affirm the Board's determination that all of the claims of the '227 patent and claims 1–16 of the '131 patent are unpatentable… As to the cross-appeal, we reverse the Board's determination that claims 17–20 of the '131 patent are not unpatentable") — https://fedcircuitblog.com/2026/05/12/opinions-orders-may-12-2026/. Note the 2-1 split: Judge Taranto dissented on the '131 claims 17–20 reversal, on party-presentation/forfeiture grounds — useful if you need to argue the cross-appeal holding is fragile.
• Active proceedings: none on the '363 patent. No institution-decision deadline, no oral hearing, no 1-year § 316(a)(11) FWD clock is running.
• A caveat on the ODP default. The absence of ODP-indexed AIA trials is a metadata artifact of a pre-institution termination, not evidence that this patent has never drawn a petition. Well-asserted patents do attract IPRs — here, one was filed and then resolved before institution. Confirm the current status of IPR2023-00452 directly on PTAB E2E / the PTAB public petitions portal (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/) before finalizing any opinion, since a non-instituted case can fall outside ODP's trial dataset.

Confidence flags: high confidence on the existence, parties, patent, and pre-institution termination of IPR2023-00452, and on the '227 FWD and the 2026-05-11 Federal Circuit disposition; low/uncertain on (i) the exact text and claim scope of the Patent Owner's "Disclaimer in Patent," (ii) the text of Board Paper 10, and (iii) the precise statutory grounds and claim mapping of the '363 petition (inferred from the exhibit list, not read). I have not fabricated any proceeding number or claim-level holding for the '363 patent.

I'll research the assignment record for this patent across USPTO sources, Google Patents legal events, and any SEC/corporate data on Metrom Rail.

Let me dig for the actual reel/frame numbers and any subsequent conveyances.

Assignment / Ownership Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 10,778,363 B2

"Methods and systems for decentralized rail signaling and positive train control"

Sourcing caveat up front. I was able to confirm the existence, date, type, parties and direction of each recorded conveyance from the patent's own legal-events record (Google Patents, authoritative extract supplied) and from the IPR/prosecution record. I was not able to pull the reel/frame numbers or the correspondent of record for the single recorded assignment: the Assignment Center's per-patent record page is not retrievable through the search tooling available to me, and no secondary mirror surfaced a reel/frame for this application. I flag every place this matters rather than inserting a number. Verify at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (patent number 10778363) or https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/.

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Inventors

Notes and pattern observations:

• Employer attribution is well supported. All four are named as assignors to Metrom Rail, LLC in the recorded assignment (see timeline). Separately, in the Marchi deposition entered in the parallel PTAB proceedings, Metrom's co-founder identifies "myself, my co-founder, Rick Carlson, Kurt Gunther, who happened to be the first employee that we employed at Metrom Rail" as the core technical team. That corroborates Carlson and Gunther as Metrom personnel rather than outside contractors.
• No departure-and-reassignment pattern. The fire-sale tell ("all inventors assign away/bounce to a new company within ~12 months of filing") is absent. Carlson and Gunther continue to appear as inventors on later Metrom filings in the same portfolio (e.g., US 11,349,589, US 12,473,002), which indicates the inventors remained with the original assignee rather than scattering.
• Data inconsistency, reported literally (not corrected). Carlson's residence is printed as Palatine, IL on this patent but as Woodstock, IL on the sibling 10,737,709 (Worker Protection System) front page reproduced in the PTAB record. Both are reproduced as found; I do not reconcile them.
• Related family patents add two further inventors (Peter Strezev; John Albert Plutt, Jr.) but they are not named on the '363 patent and are therefore out of scope here.

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Original assignee

Metrom Rail, LLC — named as applicant and assignee on the face of the patent (Crystal Lake, IL at filing; later Lakemoor, IL).

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Assignment timeline

One recorded assignment exists for this patent. Every other ownership-relevant event (file, priority, issue, expiration) is a USPTO bibliographic event, not a conveyance.

• Executed — not shown in the available record / recorded 2019-07-18 — Reel NNNNNN/NNNN — not retrievable; verify in Assignment Center
  • Conveyance: Assignment of Assignors' Interest (the USPTO abstract reads "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS)")
  • Assignor: Carlson, Richard C.; Cygnus, Marc Wayne; Gunther, Kurt Alan; Woitel, Sara Jo (all four named inventors)
  • Assignee: METROM RAIL, LLC
  • Correspondent: not retrieved. The index extract I could reach does not carry the correspondent field. (Inference, flagged as such: Metrom's prosecution/PTAB counsel of record is McAndrews, Held & Malloy, Ltd. — PO counsel in IPR2023-00452 — and the family docket number 29153US03 follows a McAndrews-style format. I cannot confirm MHM filed the assignment recording, and a single appearance would not be a signal in any event.)
  • Context: Original inventor-to-company conveyance (the standard pre-issuance "assignment of inventors' interest"). Recorded the same day the application was filed (2019-07-18), i.e., filed with the application. Not a sale, not a fire-sale, not a transfer to an assertion vehicle.

No other recorded conveyances. Specifically, no post-issuance assignment, security agreement, merger, license recordation, release, correction, or change of name appears in the record retrieved. The absence of any post-issuance assignment is itself a finding: the original assignee, Metrom Rail, LLC, is still the owner of record and is the named plaintiff in every asserted case.

If you need the reel/frame and correspondent fields confirmed, the Assignment Center search at the link above is the authoritative step. My inability to read those two fields is a tooling limitation, not evidence that they do not exist.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10778363
    2017 : Priority date Aug 4 2017
    2019 : Application filed Jul 18 2019
         : Inventors assign to Metrom Rail LLC
    2020 : Patent issued Sep 15 2020
    2022 : First infringement suit filed
    2023 : Competitor IPR filed
         : IPR denied institution
    2026 : Ownership unchanged

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — NOT PRESENT. There is no assignment from Metrom to any licensing-only vehicle. The sole assignee of record is METROM RAIL, LLC (recorded 2019-07-18), an operating manufacturer at a physical plant. No "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" successor, no registered-agent address, no single-member Delaware/Texas LLC appears anywhere in the chain.
2. Known asserter in the chain — NOT PRESENT. Metrom Rail, LLC does not match any of the named NPE directories (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Mosaid/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Innovatio, MPHJ, Lumen View, Round Rock, Document Generation, Spangenberg entities). Unified Patents' own portal carries it as a product company ("Parent Company: Metrom Rail LLC"), and RPX indexes it as a patent-owner plaintiff against operating competitors, not as a high-frequency PAE. Note the direction: Metrom is the one being IPR'd by a competitor coalition, not the one buying paper.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — UNCLEAR / NOT A FINDING. There is only one assignment link, so recurrence within the chain is impossible to test. The correspondent field on that single recording was not retrievable. A single appearance is not a signal by the stated rule; with one link there is no second data point. Do not treat this as present.
4. Cascading transfers — NOT PRESENT. Zero post-issuance assignments; therefore no chained LLC hops, no 24-month transfer cascade, no shared correspondent address across assignees.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — NOT PRESENT. The only conveyance (recorded 2019-07-18) predates the first infringement suit (filed 2022-01-13, D. Del. 1:22-cv-00049) by roughly 2.5 years, and it is the routine inventor→employer assignment executed at filing — not a transfer arranged to create standing or fix venue. The owner of record (Metrom) is also the asserting plaintiff, with no intervening assignee.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — NOT PRESENT. No Chapter 7/11 record, no trustee sale, no accompanying portfolio divestiture. Metrom is still operating and litigating as of 2026.
7. Privateering — NOT PRESENT (inverse applies). Privateering is an operating company handing patents to an NPE to assert on its behalf. Here the operating company asserts its own patents directly against larger operating competitors (Siemens Mobility, Thales Transport & Security / Ground Transportation Systems USA / Hitachi Rail GTS, Humatics, Piper Networks). That is the opposite structure.
8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — NOT PRESENT. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents or OIN. If anything the inverse is documented: Unified Patents' portal indexes the competitor-funded IPR2023-00452 filed against this patent, i.e., an anti-NPE organization working on the accused-infringer side, not the ownership side.

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Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

The entire recorded chain consists of a single conveyance — the original inventor-to-company assignment to METROM RAIL, LLC, recorded 2019-07-18 — with no post-issuance transfers, no shell LLC, and no defensive aggregator anywhere. Metrom Rail ships a product embodying the claims (AURA™ UWB collision-avoidance / train-control system, deployed on maintenance-of-way vehicles) and is asserting the '363 patent against actual competitors (Siemens Mobility, Thales/GTS USA/Hitachi Rail GTS, Humatics, Piper Networks) arising from MTA NYC Transit UWB signaling work — the classic operating-company-vs-competitor posture rather than a licensing campaign.

Two counterintuitive notes for the reader. (a) The superficial profile — a tiny, sub-$1M-revenue, ~40-person Illinois LLC suing global rail conglomerates from Delaware and S.D.N.Y. — looks NPE-like; it is not, because the plaintiff is the manufacturer of the accused-technology category and did not acquire the patents from anyone. (b) The patent's recorded legal status is "Expired – Fee Related" (anticipated expiration 2038-08-06) with Unified Patents reporting lifetime renewal fees of $0; that is a maintenance-fee issue entirely separate from ownership and, if accurate, would independently terminate enforceability regardless of who owns it. Do not conflate the two.

Verification links: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (patent 10778363) · https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/

Residual uncertainty. Reel/frame numbers and the correspondent of record for the 2019-07-18 recording are not confirmed from my tooling; the execution date is likewise not shown. Everything else above is grounded in the patent's legal-events record, the PTAB filings, and Metrom's own corporate/product materials.

I'll search for the specific patent and its cited prior art references.

I found partial citation data. Let me get the complete "References Cited" list from the patent's front page.

Let me retrieve the complete front-page reference list from additional sources.

Prior Art Analysis — US 10,778,363 B2

Patent verified: U.S. Patent No. 10,778,363 B2 — "Methods and systems for decentralized rail signaling and positive train control" — Metrom Rail, LLC; application 16/515,903; filed July 18, 2019; granted Sept. 15, 2020; earliest priority Aug. 4, 2017. Examiner: Mark T. Le.

Number-control note (per the strict rule): I excluded look-alike numbers that surfaced in the same searches — e.g., US 10,365,363 B2 ("Mobile localization using sparse time-of-flight ranges and dead reckoning") and the later Metrom filings 11,349,589 / 11,700,075 / 12,473,002. Those are different patents and are not treated as the subject here. Where the OCR of a cited number is self-inconsistent I report it literally and flag it rather than silently correcting it.

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1. Verification status of the reference list (read first)

The authoritative full text supplied to me (Google Patents) was truncated in the Description and contained no front page (56) "References Cited" block and no claims. I therefore reconstructed the citation list from the primary prosecution/PTAB record: the front page reproduced inside the IPR2023-00452 petition papers (USPTO PTAB document repository, artifact YS7wXXhBBRTNaG6QbHNHBZwvg4BiBAert6axNNovF6E0M-jWlvqXdgY), which quotes the patent's own "(56) References Cited" heading.

Two consequences you should weigh:

• The retrieved list is partial. The OCR shows a "(Continued)" marker and the list terminates mid-entry (last captured entry: "8,651,433 B2…"). Unified Patents' aggregator page for the same patent reports "Patent Art (119)", "Non-Patent Literature (7)", and "Referenced By (7)" — so the full cited-art set is larger than what follows.
• Cited ≠ relied upon. A reference printed on the front page is not automatically an anticipation reference. Most of these were cited by the Examiner in §103 combinations; the record I retrieved does not contain the Examiner's actual rejection rationale. I flag §102 anticipation candidates explicitly in §6.

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2. The references that actually drove the challenge (highest relevance)

These are the two references the IPR2023-00452 petitioner (Siemens Mobility, Ground Transportation Systems USA, Humatics, Piper Networks) treated as material to US 10,778,363, and they are the most probative prior art of record:

Petitioner's own framing (verbatim from the petition excerpt):

• "B. Ground 2: Claims 1-14 Would Have Been Obvious Over Ghaly in View of Heddebaut."
• Headings: "2. Ghaly (EX1008): European Patent No. 2,571,742 B1 … a. Location and Speed Determination … b. Movement Authority Limit and Stopping Profile … c. MAL and Stopping Profile Enforcement"; "3. Heddebaut (EX1009): U.S. Patent 7,725,252 B2 … a. Heddebaut's Transmitting/Receiving Elements; b. Transmitting/Receiving of Ultra-Wideband Signals; c. Processing of Ultra-Wideband Signals."

⚠️ Critical legal point: both grounds are pleaded as §103 obviousness, not §102 anticipation. No single reference in the record was shown to disclose every limitation of claim 1. If you are asking "which reference anticipates under §102," the honest answer from this record is none was demonstrated — the art was combined. I give the closest §102 candidates in §6.

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3. Front-page U.S. Patent Documents (as retrieved, literal)

Full citation · publication date · inventor-of-record as printed:

Numbering flags (literal reproduction, no auto-correction):

• "8,650,242 B2 / 11/2003 / Clerk et al." is internally inconsistent — an 8-series (≈2014) number cannot issue in 2003. The underlying reference is almost certainly 6,650,242 B2. I report the printed form and flag the conflict rather than correcting it.
• "4,459,668" appears as "4,459,668"; watch for a 4,445,668 variant in secondary databases.
• "8,651,433 B2" is truncated with no date/inventor in the captured text.

Descriptive notes (confidence-stated):

• US 7,725,252 B2 (Heddebaut) — high confidence: UWB-based rail-vehicle positioning/control (the core UWB teaching relied on in IPR Ground 2).
• US 8,200,380 B2 (Ghaly) — moderate confidence: train-control/positioning art (the Ground 2 primary reference). Its EP counterpart EP 2,571,742 B1 is the family member actually cited in the IPR.
• US 6,208,260 B1 (West et al.), US 8,344,877 B2 (Sheardown), US 6,732,023 B2 (Sugita), US 7,624,952 B1 / 8,109,474 B2 (Bartek), US 5,924,651 / 5,727,758 / 6,145,792 (Penza) — railway/train-control and vehicle-monitoring art. I could not verify the exact subject matter of each from the retrieved sources, so I do not attribute specific disclosures to them. Several (Penza, West, Bartek) are the type of signal/communications train-control references typically used in §103 combinations against "train determines location/speed and enforces braking" limitations.
• The 1949/1956 entries (Halstead, Jepson) are early ATC-signalling art and are, on their face, too remote in time/technology to anticipate a UWB decentralized system — they would be background only.

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4. Foreign Patent Documents (as retrieved)

AU 2012227260 / AU 2015201462 share the 2012-era priority bracket with EP 2,571,742 (Ghaly) and are plausibly family members of the Ghaly art — but I did not verify the family link, so treat that as a hypothesis, not a finding.

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5. Non-Patent Literature cited

Two distinct NPL sets appeared, and they should not be conflated:

(a) As reported by the aggregator for the patent itself: Non-Patent Literature (7) — the seven items were not itemized in the retrieved source.

(b) The substantive NPL universe from the related Metrom litigation/IPR file (retrieved via the Justia record for the sibling Metrom case, patent 12,473,002, listing the petitioner's/supplier's exhibit set). These are the references actually injected into the §102/§103 debate:

• Certified English translation of DE 10 2008 020 700 A1 ("Meyer")
• IEEE Std 802.15.4-2011 (LR-WPANs)
• Newton's Telecom Dictionary (27th ed. 2013)
• Time Domain Corp., Ultra Wideband (UWB) Definition and Advantages (Mar. 2011)
• Assessment of the Contribution of Time Reversal of a UWB Localization System for Railway Application, Int. J. ITS Res. (2016)
• C. L. Bennett & G. F. Ross, "Time-domain electromagnetics and its applications," Proc. IEEE, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 299–318 (Mar. 1978)
• "CCS: A Railway Corridor Control System Utilizing UWB Radio Technology," P. A. Flaherty, 2004 ASME/IEEE Joint Rail Conference (Apr. 6–8, 2004)
• ETSI TR 101 538 V1.1.1 (Oct. 2012)
• SAE J2735 (2009-11)
• NTSB, Collision of Metrolink Train 111 With Union Pacific Train LOF65-12 (Sept. 12, 2008); FRA collision statistics; FRA Highway-Rail Grade Crossing materials; Positive Train Control (May 2012); RSAC, Implementation of Positive Train Control Systems (Sept. 8, 1999); 49 C.F.R. §236.0 (Oct. 1, 2010); US Frequency Allocations — The Radio Spectrum (2003); 63 Fed. Reg. 39343–39357; G. Bibel, Train Wreck — The Forensics of Rail Disasters (2012); Veritech, Operation of the Eaton VORAD Collision Warning System
• Litigation record: Metrom v. Siemens, No. 23-cv-5097 — Opinion & Order (ECF 90, Jan. 29, 2024); Second Amended Complaint (ECF 69-1, May 26, 2023); Declaration + CV of Foster J. Peterson (May 2023)

The two NPL items most relevant to the UWB limitations of claim 1 are Flaherty (2004) ("Railway Corridor Control System Utilizing UWB Radio Technology") and the Bennett & Ross (1978) foundational UWB paper; Meyer (DE 10 2008 020 700 A1) is the type of reference used against UWB ranging/localization claims.

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6. § 102 anticipation mapping — what can and cannot be said

Bottom line: no reference of record is shown to anticipate any claim of US 10,778,363 under §102. The invalidity theory of record is §103 (Ghaly + Heddebaut, claims 1–14). I list the closest §102 candidates with an explicit confidence grade, but flag that the record does not support a clean anticipation finding against claim 1:

Claim-to-reference framing (using the claim limitations recoverable from the IPR petition):

• Claim 1 ([1PRE]–[1E]): the system + wayside units + train-mounted units + UWB communication + ranging measurements obtained by broadcasting UWB with unit identification, selecting responding wayside units, and ranging. The only reference supplying the UWB broadcast/ranging core is Heddebaut; the only reference supplying the decentralized train-control/position/speed/MAL structure is Ghaly. Neither alone covers all of [1A]–[1E] — hence the §103 ground.
• Claim 2 (control info from sources other than UWB), Claim 3 (assessment based on …), Claim 7, and Claims 8–16 (satellite input; interfacing with other train systems; I/O; power; non-system components; continually-determined absolute position; position from non-ranging positioning info; position acquired as the train passes each wayside unit; non-UWB acquisition of that positioning info): petitioner charted claims 1–14 against the Ghaly+Heddebaut combination. Claims directed to absolute position (13/14) and satellite positioning (8) map most naturally to Ghaly-style PTC art plus standard GPS/positioning references; claim 16 (non-UWB acquisition) maps to the secondary non-UWB communication art.

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7. Conflicts and limitations of this analysis (explicit)

1. The granted claims of US 10,778,363 were not in the authoritative text I was supplied, so all claim limitations above are drawn from the IPR petition's quotation of them, not from the patent itself. Treat limitation text as provisional.
2. Ground 1 of the IPR is only partially captured. The excerpt shows a full limitation chart (claim 1 [1PRE]–[1E] plus claims 2–16), but the identity of the Ground 1 primary reference was not in the retrieved excerpt. Ground 2 (Ghaly + Heddebaut, claims 1–14) is the only fully identified ground.
3. The front-page (56) list is truncated (ends at "8,651,433 B2" with a "(Continued)" marker). Additional U.S. and foreign documents and 7 NPL items exist beyond what is reproduced here (aggregator count: 119 patent references).
4. Number inconsistencies reproduced literally, not corrected: "8,650,242 B2 / 11/2003" (internally impossible — likely 6,650,242) and the truncated "8,651,433 B2".
5. IPR2023-00452 was Not Instituted (procedural) — so none of these references has been adjudicated as invalidating art on the merits.
6. No 2026 Federal Circuit docket activity for 10,778,363 was found (reported as "none found," not "none exists"). District-court assertions of the '363 patent remain in D. Del. 1:23-cv-00314 and the S.D.N.Y./D. Del. Metrom v. Siemens/Piper actions.

If you need the complete front-page (56) list itemized (all U.S. and foreign documents plus the 7 NPL items), the reliable next step is to pull the granted-patent PDF or the USPTO PatentCenter "Patent Full-Text" page for 16/515,903 — both contain the full "References Cited" block that the truncated source omitted.

I'll research the prior art landscape for this patent, including the prior art cited in the IPR petition and known UWB/rail-signaling references.

Let me pull the specific grounds and cited references from the IPR petition and the patent's own cited-art list.

Let me pull more of the petition's grounds (Ground 2, 3, etc.) and its motivation-to-combine reasoning.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 10,778,363 B2

"Methods and systems for decentralized rail signaling and positive train control"

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0. Source note and scope flags (read before the analysis)

Flag 1 — the "Prior Art section" was not present in the provided page text. The authoritative Google Patents extract supplied to me (https://patents.google.com/patent/[US10778363](/patent/US10778363)/en) was truncated in the Description and contained no "Citations," "Cited By," "Similar Documents," or "Prior Art" table. The only prior-art-adjacent data it did contain was the aggregator's auto-extracted "Prior art keywords: train, ptcs, unit, uwb, wayside." I therefore could not enumerate the examiner-cited art from the primary source. To avoid fabricating a citation list, I have grounded this analysis on the prior-art record actually developed against this patent, which is the IPR2023-00452 petition exhibit set (Siemens Mobility, Inc.; Ground Transportation Systems USA, Inc.; Humatics Corp.; Piper Networks, Inc. v. Metrom Rail, LLC, Case No. IPR2023-00452, Patent No. 10,778,363) — retrieved at https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1550896](/patent/1550896)/download-documents — plus the sibling-patent Grisham/Nixon/Douglas art relied on by the Board in the '131/'227 IPRs.

Flag 2 — claim text is second-hand. As already noted in the previously generated sections, the granted claims were not in the provided text. The claim language used below is the verbatim element-by-element quotation in the IPR petition ([1PRE]–[1E4], claims 2–16), which is the best available primary rendering. Indep. claims beyond claim 1 and any claims above 16 remain unverified.

Flag 3 — date inconsistency. This task states the current date is April 26, 2026; my operating environment reports 2026-09-12; and the previously generated sections report Federal Circuit and Massachusetts activity dated May 11–12, 2026 and June 4, 2026. I am not auto-correcting any of these; the analysis below is date-stable because every reference at issue published years before any plausible priority date.

Flag 4 — the IPR was never instituted, and a statutory disclaimer was filed. IPR2023-00452 is recorded as Not Instituted – Procedural; Patent Owner filed a preliminary response and a statutory disclaimer and petitioners' refund was approved (July 27, 2023). Non-institution is not a merits finding of non-obviousness — but the disclaimer matters, because 35 U.S.C. § 253 treats a statutorily disclaimed claim as though it never existed. Which claims were disclaimed is not confirmed in the sources retrieved; if claim 1 or the claim set at issue was disclaimed, the § 103 question below becomes moot as to those claims. This should be verified against the USPTO disclaimer record before relying on any conclusion.

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1. The § 103 frame

Level of ordinary skill (POSITA)

A person of ordinary skill would have a B.S. in electrical/computer engineering (or equivalent) and roughly 3–5 years of experience in railway signaling, train control (PTC/CBTC), or short-range RF ranging/positioning — or equivalent industry experience. This level matters because the asserted combinations are all integration propositions within an already-converged field: by 2012–2016, UWB ranging for rail and "intelligent"/decentralized train regulation were each independently documented, including in a standards-body publication (ETSI TR 101 538, 2012-10, EX1018) and a 2004 railway-corridor UWB paper ("CCS: A Railway Corridor Control System Utilizing Ultra Wideband Radio Technology," EX1026).

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2. The four combinations petitioners advanced, and why each would have been obvious

Petitioners pleaded four parallel grounds (petition § VII). Each is a textbook KSR combination — all references in the same field of endeavor, combining to supply a missing functional element that the primary reference's own architecture demands.

Ground 1 — Carlson alone (EX1005, U.S. Pub. 2015/0329130), claims 1–16: anticipated and/or obvious

What it supplies: A UWB-based train-positioning/control arrangement in which train-borne UWB radios range against wayside-located UWB radios and against other trains. Carlson is squarely the same field and addresses the same problem (precise train location, separation, collision avoidance).

Why obvious: Where a single reference discloses every element arranged as claimed, * anticipation* and obviousness collapse into the same showing — a § 103 conclusion follows a fortiori.

Ground 2 — Ghaly (EX1008, EP 2,571,742) + Heddebaut (EX1009), claims 1–14

What Ghaly supplies: A decentralized architecture — "intelligent" trains that self-regulate their movement based on their own location and speed. This maps directly onto:

• [1PRE] "system for providing decentralized control operations in a railway network";
• [1B] train-mounted units; [1C2] generating control information for controlling train functions.

What Ghaly lacks: the specific ranging modality — the UWB-based signalling and the broadcast/response/select ranging sequence of [1C1], [1D], [1E1]–[1E4].

What Heddebaut supplies: a published railway-application UWB radiolocation teaching (Heddebaut is also a named author on the railway-UWB literature in the same exhibit set, EX1012, Int. J. ITS Res., "Assessment of the Contribution of Time Reversal of a UWB Localization System for Railway Application" — I could not retrieve EX1009's exact title, so I state this relationship as inferred, not confirmed).

Motivation to combine (the strongest rationale here): A self-regulating train of the Ghaly type is useless without a location and speed input. Ghaly itself needs precisely the data UWB ranging provides. Heddebaut/ETSI (EX1012, EX1018) supply a known, standards-documented technique for producing exactly that input in a railway environment. Combining a known sensing technique into a control system whose stated function requires that input is the archetypal KSR "predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions." The patent's own specification reinforces the reasonableness of the combination by urging that UWB gives "ranges over one half of a mile, and with sub-inch distance accuracy … in either in open air or difficult tunnels environments" — i.e., the patentee's own admission that the technique was capable and suitable.

Ground 3 — Carlson + Gantner (EX1007, U.S. Pub. 2009/0253439), claims 1–16

What Gantner supplies: the interrogation/selection protocol missing from Carlson: broadcasting an interrogation, receiving responses from plural fixed wayside transponders/beacons, and acting on the responders. This maps onto [1E1] (broadcasting), [1E2] (signals carrying identifying information), and especially [1E3] ("selecting based on received responses to the broadcast … one or more of the plurality of wayside units").

Motivation: Both references address vehicle/rail location via wireless signalling; Gantner's teach of polling one-of-many wayside devices is a known interoperability technique for turning a broadcast into an addressable, selective ranging session. A POSITA seeking to scale a UWB train system from one anchor to many anchors (the express object of claim 1's [1E3]–[1E4]) would naturally adopt the well-known poll-then-select pattern. The combination is a combination of familiar elements yielding no more than their predictable aggregate.

Ground 4 — Ghaly + Heddebaut + Gantner, claims 1–14

The same Gantner addition applied to the Ground 2 pair, supplying [1E1]–[1E3] to a decentralized-control architecture that already has the UWB ranging teaching of Heddebaut.

Supporting "conventionality" exhibits the petition deployed for the narrowest elements

These are not independent grounds but are used to prove that the specific sub-steps of [1E] were routine:

Additional exhibits in the set (EX1010 US 2016/0046308; EX1011 US 2007/0293153; EX1021 US 2004/0240565; EX1022 US 2010/0235460; EX1024 US 9,606,217; EX1025 US 5,452,870; EX1031 US 6,631,322) are directed to supplementary train-location, GPS, and wayside-communication teachings of the kind that fill the dependent claims below. I have not verified the title or precise publication date of each of these individually and do not assert mappings for them beyond their role in the petition's exhibit list.

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3. Dependent-claim § 103 walk-through

The through-line: every dependent claim recites a conventional adjunct to train location/control (GPS, RFID, axle counters, operator-failure enforcement) that the specification itself acknowledges as pre-existing context. Under KSR, "if a technique has been used to improve one device, and a person of ordinary skill in the art would recognize that it would improve similar devices in the same way, using the technique is obvious."

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4. Why a POSITA would have combined these references — consolidated motivations

1. Same field of endeavor / reasonably pertinent. Rail signaling, train separation, PTC, and UWB radiolocation for railways. No field-crossing problem under KSR/Duncan.
2. The patent's own admitted deficiency supplies the motivation. The specification's Background states that incumbent CBTC "are expensive, difficult to install, have availability issues, require extensive ongoing maintenance, and do not always provide the headroom improvements which are initially projected." That admission is a ready-made statement of the problem a POSITA was motivated to solve — and the asserted art solves it with cheaper, cable-free, precise ranging.
3. Complementary capabilities, no functional interference. Ghaly supplies the decentralized control logic but needs location/speed; Heddebaut/ETSI supply location/speed via UWB; Gantner supplies multi-anchor interrogation/selection; Carlson supplies the integrated UWB train-borne + wayside architecture. Every reference retains its function in the combination — a KSR "mere aggregation of known elements" posture.
4. Reasonable expectation of success. By 2012 a standards body had published UWB rail ranging (EX1018) and by 2004 a railway-corridor UWB control paper existed (EX1026); the patent itself concedes half-mile range and sub-inch accuracy. UWB's multipath immunity in tunnels (spec ¶0037) made it the predictable choice for exactly the metro/tunnel environment at issue.
5. Design incentive / cost pressure. Replacing track-mounted transducers and hard-wired back-office infrastructure with wireless wayside anchors was a known cost-reduction trajectory; a POSITA had a concrete economic reason to substitute UWB ranging for track-mounted position detection.

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5. Objective indicia — and why they likely fail here

Metrom's commercial narrative (AURA CAS; MTA "Genius Challenge for Signaling" win in 2018; deployment on "thousands of railway maintenance-of-way vehicles" per its Jan. 19, 2022 press release at https://www.einpresswire.com/article_print/560943289) would be the natural secondary-considerations case. Two problems:

• Nexus. In Metrom Rail, LLC v. Siemens Mobility, Inc., No. 24-2223 (Fed. Cir. May 11, 2026) — a nonprecedential decision concerning the '131 and '227 patents (not the '363), reported at https://www.vitallaw.com/news/patent-fed-cir-[ptab](/ptab)-s-invalidation-of-railroad-collision-avoidance-patent-claims-affirmed-surviving-claims-also-obvious/ipm0139724f39c7384235bd25d80517150a21 — the court held the Board properly refused the presumption of nexus because the AURA CAS product included significant unclaimed features (machine-function monitoring and remote data reporting), and that Metrom "failed to show that any alleged commercial success resulted directly from the unique characteristics of the patented invention." That reasoning is product-specific and would transfer to the '363 patent's own commercial-indicia defense, though it is not binding as to '363.
• Timing. Much of the cited praise (2018 MTA award) sits within months of the Aug. 2017 priority date, which weakens the inference of long-felt need and unexpected results.

I am not aware of any teaching away or unexpected results evidence in the record retrieved; absent such evidence, and given the Fed. Cir.'s nexus holding on the same product, the secondary-considerations path looks weak for the '363 patent.

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6. Cross-check: the Board and the Federal Circuit have already run this movie

In the parallel Metrom/Siemens family litigation, the Board found all claims of the '227 patent and claims 1–16 of the '131 patent obvious over Grisham (U.S. 6,759,948 — railroad collision-avoidance using UWB) in view of Nixon (WO 03/009254 A1 — GPS functionality) and Douglas (U.S. 8,874,359 — location tracking), and the Federal Circuit affirmed that on May 11, 2026 (and reversed as to claims 17–20 on claim construction, Judge Taranto dissenting). The '131/'227 patents share a 2011 priority date and the same general subject matter. Grisham predates the '363 patent's priority by roughly 18 years and already discloses UWB-based rail collision avoidance; that decision is powerful, corroborating evidence that the UWB-ranging-plus-GPS train-control concept was well established before Aug. 4, 2017.

For the '363 patent specifically, IPR2023-00452 was not instituted (procedural), so the Board never adjudicated the § 103 question on this claim set. That is a procedural non-event, not a merits ruling.

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7. Residual uncertainty / verification checklist

1. Which claims were statutorily disclaimed (Apr. 19, 2023) — verify at the USPTO; if claim 1 was disclaimed, this entire § 103 analysis is moot as to it.
2. Granted claim text and independent-claim count — retrieve the printed claims; the analysis above covers only claims 1–16 as quoted in the petition.
3. EX1009 (Heddebaut) — exact title/date not confirmed; the UWB-railway teaching is inferred from the co-authored EX1012 and the Ground 2 structure.
4. Exhibit titles for EX1010, EX1011, EX1021–EX1025, EX1031, EX1032 — taken from the petition's exhibit list; individual title/date mappings beyond the petition's own use are not independently verified here.
5. Current status (2026) of the '363-asserting cases and the effect of the "Expired – Fee Related" / "Lifetime Renewal Fees: $0" aggregator fields (see the litigation section's caveat) — a genuine lapse would independently terminate any enforcement, separate from validity.

Bottom line: On the record developed in IPR2023-00452, each independent element of claim 1 carries a specific, pre-2016 reference; the four pleaded grounds are conventional KSR combinations in a single, converged field; and the dependent claims add only acknowledged-conventional adjuncts. The strongest single showing is Ghaly + Heddebaut (decentralized self-regulating trains given a known-and-standards-documented UWB ranging input) reinforced by Gantner for the broadcast/response/select sequence, and Carlson as a one-reference baseline. The principal defenses available to the patent owner are (a) the procedural fact of non-institution, (b) any surviving claim that was not disclaimed and that recites a specific broadcast/selection/timing sequence not squarely met by the art, and (c) objective indicia — which the Federal Circuit's May 2026 nexus holding, on the same product, materially undercuts.