US 11402362

I'll verify this patent against live sources, including any litigation or CAFC activity.

Initial searches returned no relevant matches. Let me probe further for assignment, family, and any litigation.

Let me pull the claim text specifically.

US 11,402,362 B2 — Verification Summary

Scope note up front: Per your instruction I searched specifically for the identifier 11402362. I did not find any USPTO litigation record, PTAB proceeding, or CAFC 2026 docket involving this patent number. My tool access is web search only — I could not query USPTO Patent Center, the CAFC docket system, or Docket Navigator directly, so treat the "no litigation found" statement as a search-based negative, not an authoritative clearance. I also did not auto-correct or conflate this number with look-alikes. One search result did surface a different patent — U.S. 11,930,362 ("Functionality in Software Applications," Damaka v. Cisco, IPR2026-00210) — which is not this patent and is excluded from everything below.

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Confirmed bibliographic data

The assignee attribution is corroborated independently by the Chinese Academy of Sciences institutional repository (CAS IR GRID), which lists the same patent number, title, inventor set, and IEEE-style citation. A third-party aggregator page attributes the patent to "GlobalFoundries" — that is a data artifact of the aggregator and is inconsistent with USPTO, Google Patents, and CAS records; I disregard it.

Abstract (as published)

The patent concerns a comprehensive monitoring and data-mining system/method for lake algae (cyanobacteria) blooms. Monitoring indicator data are acquired by three channels — remote sensing monitoring, automatic monitoring, and manual surveying — and transmitted to a data center over the Internet. The data center performs backup and preprocessing, including temporal interpolation, spatial interpolation, and outlier determination/processing; the preprocessed data are stored in a database; a 3D numerical model of the lake is computed from the stored data; bloom risk is assessed from the model simulation data; and predictive warning information is published on a public platform.

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Independent claims — status of my information

I want to be precise here rather than guess: the authoritative full claim set was not retrievable within my search budget. The patent body I have is the specification, abstract, and definitions — it does not include the numbered claims. I will not fabricate verbatim claim language. What follows is an inference of claim architecture from the "Summary of the Invention" section, which is conventionally drafted to track the independent claims almost word-for-word in this family, and it should be verified against the Claims tab of Google Patents or USPTO Patent Center before being relied on.

Independent Claim 1 — System (inferred, high confidence). A comprehensive monitoring and data-mining system for lake algae bloom, comprising:

• a monitoring system for acquiring data to be monitored, itself comprising (a) a remote sensing monitoring system having a satellite data receiving antenna, a computer, and a power supply system — the antenna feeds satellite data to the computer, which performs remote-sensing inversion and transmits processed data to the data processing system via the Internet; (b) an automatic monitoring system implemented as a monitoring network of multiple automatic monitoring stations linked by wireless network, each station comprising a water surface supporting system (buoy body, trestle bridge, or water platform), a power supply system, a safety warning system (beacon lights, fluorescent bands, warning signs), and a data acquisition system drawing from meteorological, hydrological, water-quality, and video instruments; and (c) a manual surveying system for manual data acquisition transmitted via the Internet; and
• a data processing system for receiving and processing the acquired data, comprising a server, an array processor, a computer, a computing workstation, a hardware firewall, a router, network cables, and a power supply device, with the server in a dual-unit hot-standby configuration (two mutually backing-up servers, only one running at a time), the two servers and array processor heartbeat-connected via a three-prong cable, and all computers/servers/workstations connected to the hardware firewall and thence to the external network through the router.

Independent method claim (inferred, high confidence). A comprehensive monitoring and data-mining method for lake algae bloom, comprising:

1. Acquiring monitoring indicator data (meteorological, hydrological, water-quality indicators and video images) via the three channels — remote sensing monitoring, automatic monitoring, manual surveying — and transmitting to a data center over the Internet;
2. In the data center, performing data backup and preprocessing comprising: temporal interpolation where the acquisition interval is interrupted; spatial interpolation to fill missing satellite data in cloud-coverage areas; and outlier determination/processing replacing abnormal data with the preceding datum; then transmitting preprocessed data together with raw data to a database for storage;
3. Constructing a 3D numerical model of the lake from the database data by constructing a hydrodynamic model, superimposing a material migration and transformation model (illumination, suspended substance, algae growth, nutrient salt circulation, dissolved oxygen), performing equation coupling computation, and solving by finite differences to obtain simulation data;
4. Assessing bloom risk from the simulation data; and
5. Displaying predictive warning information on a public platform.

Notable dependent-claim subject matter (inferred). The written description dedicates lengthy, specifically-claimed-seeming disclosure to: the storage strategies per data type (single-station sheets, 2D arrays, 3D arrays stored by time node, image/video path sheets with indexed access); linear/spline/piecewise temporal interpolation and the specific linear formula; the inverse-distance-weighted spatial interpolation formula with a ≥3-point search radius; the 5× variance outlier test (ā ± 5 SD, with replacement by the m−1 datum); Oracle as the preferred database; the enumerated hydrodynamic equations (5)–(9), the A_v / A_v0 / Richardson-number closure (10)–(12), and the wind-drag (C_WD = 0.001) and bottom-friction (C_SD = 0.003) boundary terms; the biochemical source terms SK₁–SK₆ for algae, zooplankton, DTP, DTN, DO and BOD₅; Monte Carlo parameter optimization with rolling autonomous forecasts; and the Taihu Lake example (18 stations, 30-minute resolution, 69×69×5 grid, 1000 m cells, 30 s time step, WRF-driven 3-day forecast).

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Uncertainty flags

1. No litigation found. Searches for a CAFC 2026 docket, district court suit, or PTAB proceeding on 11402362 returned nothing relevant. I cannot rule out a proceeding that is unindexed by public web search.
2. Claim text not verbatim-verified. The system/method claim structures above are inferred from the specification and the patent's "Summary of the Invention" drafting convention. Verbatim independent claim language and the exact independent/dependent claim split should be confirmed on the USPTO Patent Center or the Google Patents Claims tab.
3. Assignee naming. As recorded, the chain is "Nanjing Institute Of Geography" → "Nanjing Institute of Geography & Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences." These are the same institution under its former/current names; I state both literally rather than harmonizing them.
4. Term. The 2039-03-10 expiration reflects a listed adjustment/PCT-based term calculation; the 20-year date from the 2017-06-19 PCT filing alone would be 2037-06-19, so the adjustment entry is the source of the later date. This is a record observation, not a legal conclusion.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 11402362 across patent litigation databases.

Let me search additional litigation-specific sources.

Let me run a few more targeted searches on litigation databases.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 11,402,362

Bottom Line

No litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 11,402,362 was found. Based on the searches conducted, there is no evidence that this patent has ever been asserted in a U.S. district court, at the Federal Circuit, before the PTAB, or under Section 337 at the ITC.

Patent Identification (as it appears in the record)

Litigation

Basis for This Conclusion, and Its Limits

What I searched. I ran queries against Google-indexed patent-litigation aggregators and full-text sources, including the Unified Patents litigation caselist material, Docket Alarm PTAB/IPR records, Google Patents (which links to litigation where known), and general keyword searches combining the patent number with "litigation," "lawsuit," "infringement complaint," "district court," and "PACER." I also searched the patent number in both 11402362 and 11,402,362 forms, per the instruction not to auto-correct identifiers.

What the searches returned. Every hit for "11402362" resolved to the patent's own bibliographic records (e.g., the CAS-IR institutional repository at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Patent Leaderboard's inventor listing). No docket entries, complaints, IPR petitions, or court opinions referencing this patent number appeared.

Context that supports the null result. The assignee is a Chinese Academy of Sciences research institute, not a monetization entity. Google Patents lists no "Litigation" or "PTAB" section for this patent, which is where such activity would normally surface. The patent's classification (G01N 33/18 — water testing; G01N 33/0098 — plants) and subject matter (lake cyanobacteria-bloom monitoring) place it in an environmental-instrumentation space with a low litigation profile.

Caveats — please weight these explicitly. I must be candid about the limits of this analysis:

1. Absence of evidence is not conclusive proof of absence. The free, web-accessible litigation sources I could reach via search do not constitute a complete docket of all U.S. district court filings.
2. The authoritative tools are paywalled. A definitive negative would require direct queries of Docket Navigator and Lex Machina (subscription), and a PACER docket search across all districts, none of which I could access here.
3. The Unified Patents caselist and PACER were not directly queryable through the search interface available to me; my results reflect search-engine indexing of those sources, not a direct database lookup by patent number.
4. Small or unreported suits, and state-court or foreign proceedings, would be especially easy to miss.

Recommended next steps for a definitive clearance. To confirm the negative with professional certainty, run the patent number (search variants: 11402362, 11,402,362, 16/329,943) directly against:

• Docket Navigator — Litigation and PTAB modules;
• Lex Machina — patent case search;
• PACER — cross-district search by patent number;
• USITC EDIS — for any Section 337 investigation;
• Unified Patents litigation caselist (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) and its Patent Trial Tracker.

If you would like, I can prepare a docket-search checklist and exact query strings for those paid platforms.

I'll verify the canonical "no proceedings" result against live sources before writing.

Let me run additional targeted checks on PTAB dockets and appeals.

Let me check CourtListener and Federal Circuit dockets for any appeal activity.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings on file. As of 2026-09-29, the USPTO Open Data Portal structured record for US 11,402,362 returns no IPR, no PGR, and no CBM — no petitions filed, no institutions, no final written decisions, no terminations, and no Federal Circuit appeals arising from any PTAB trial. The breakdown the template asks for is therefore degenerate: 0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denials.

Bottom line for a defendant: the patent is completely untested at the Board. There is no canceled claim you can point a demand letter at, and equally there is no Board precedent hardening it. Nothing has been narrowed, and nothing has been blessed. Any validity position you take is being taken for the first time, by you. That cuts both ways — but note the asymmetry: a patent that has never drawn a petition is a patent whose prior-art landscape has never been stress-tested, and simultaneously one whose owner has never had to defend it.

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Proceedings

None. There are no proceeding numbers to report, and I will not manufacture any.

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Basis for the null result, and its limits

Canonical source. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block supplied to me — sourced from the USPTO Open Data Portal — contains no AIA trial records for this patent. That is the authoritative list for this task.

Corroborating web checks (run 2026-09-29). I searched for the patent number in multiple forms (11402362, 11,402,362), combined with PTAB, IPR, PGR, petition, Patent Trial and Appeal Board, challenged, and validity; I also searched the application number 16/329,943 and the patent owner ("Nanjing Institute of Geography & Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences") against PTAB challenge terms.

Results, stated plainly:

• No petition, institution decision, FWD, or appeal for US 11,402,362 surfaced in any indexed source.
• The patent number appeared in only two kinds of contexts, both coincidental:
  • 16/329,943 returned a different patent — the Avation Medical, Inc. PGR2024-00043 demonstrative exhibit, which refers to "the '943 patent" meaning a different patent whose serial happens to end in /943. That is a false-positive string collision on a truncated identifier, not a proceeding against US 11,402,362. Flagging this explicitly because it is exactly the kind of hit that invites a fabricated proceeding number.
  • 11402362 returned a Taiwanese charitable-donation receipt ("線上11402362") — an unrelated transaction ID.
• A search for PTAB activity by the patent owner returned nothing, which is the expected profile for an academic-institute assignee that has never asserted the patent.

This null result is consistent with the previously generated litigation section, which found no district court, ITC, or Federal Circuit activity. The two findings reinforce each other: patents that are never asserted essentially never attract IPRs, because the § 315(b) one-year clock and the economic incentive to petition both depend on an assertion.

Caveats — weight these explicitly:

1. Absence of evidence is not proof of absence. Free, search-indexed sources are not a complete PTAB docket.
2. Institution decisions and FWDs are public, but very recent filings may not yet be indexed by the ODP ingest I was given or by search engines. A petition filed within the last few weeks could be missing.
3. I could not directly query PTAB E2E, Patent Center, or the ODP API through the search interface available to me; my results reflect search-engine indexing of those systems rather than a direct patent-number lookup.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: 100% UNTESTED. No claim of US 11,402,362 has been canceled, confirmed, or even construed by the Board. There is no "surviving claim" set to list, because there is no proceeding to have generated one. Be careful not to describe this patent as "hardened" — surviving an IPR hardens claims, and this patent has survived nothing; it has simply never been attacked. On paper its full original scope is intact.

Estoppel: none exists. § 315(e)(2) estoppel runs only against a petitioner (and its real parties in interest and privies) that has actually sought and obtained institution. With no petitioner of record, no estoppel attaches to anyone. There is no prior-art ground that has been "spent." Practically, this means your invalidity case is unconstrained by the Board — but it also means you get no free ride: you cannot leverage someone else's grounded petition, and there is no IPR record, expert declaration, or FWD reasoning to borrow. You would be building the first challenge from scratch, including the § 102/§ 103 analysis and any claim-construction positions.

Pattern signals: all absent. No serial petitioner, no follow-on petition General Plastic issue, no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents or RPX involvement appears anywhere in the chain — the assignee is a Chinese Academy of Sciences institute), and no patent-owner appeal history at the Federal Circuit. The patent is, for AIA purposes, a blank slate.

One nuance worth flagging. The subject matter (G01N 33/18 water testing; G01N 33/0098 plants) and the environmental-instrumentation field carry a low litigation and low IPR profile. Combined with a non-practicing, non-monetizing academic assignee, the most likely reading is a patent that is simply not being enforced — not one that has been quietly withstood attacks. If you are a defendant, the absence of PTAB activity is itself the signal: you would be the first mover, and the absence of any prior challenge means you should expect the patent owner to have given little thought to the prior art.

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Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant being asserted against (or crediting a demand letter):

• Do not rely on any claim having been canceled. No FWD exists for this patent. Anyone telling you "claims X–Y are already dead" is wrong. The patent stands at full scope.
• Run your own freedom-to-operate / invalidity analysis as a first challenge, not a follow-on. There is no petition to piggyback on and no estoppel-constrained ground.
• Confirm the negative directly before you rely on it. Run the patent number (variants: 11402362, 11,402,362, 16/329,943) against:
  • PTAB E2E / PTAB Center: https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptabweb/ and https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations
  • USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP) API — the same source as the canonical block here, re-pulled at filing time since ingest lags
  • USPTO Patent Center (transaction history for application 16/329,943)
  • Docket Navigator — PTAB module and Lex Machina (subscription; definitive)
  • CourtListener / RECAP — https://www.courtlistener.com/ — for any CAFC appeal of a PTAB decision
• Check appeal exposure even without a PTAB case. No PTAB appeal exists; there is likewise no evidence of a District Court judgment feeding a § 1295(a)(1) appeal. Same caveat applies as in the litigation section — the authoritative dockets (PACER, CourtListener RECAP) should be searched directly.
• If you plan to file an IPR, note there is no § 315(b) bar of record because no complaint appears to have been served in any indexed proceeding — verify service dates yourself before relying on that. The one-year clock starts on service of a complaint alleging infringement, not on the demand letter.

Plain statement of the conclusion: there is no PTAB activity on this patent. No proceeding numbers, no panels, no FWDs, no settlements, no appeals. I have not fabricated any, and the two near-miss search hits (/943 serial collision and a Taiwanese donation ID) are expressly identified as false positives.

I'll research the assignment record for this patent across multiple sources.

Let me dig deeper into the assignment records specifically.

Research note before the findings

I attempted to pull the assignment records directly from USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov) and from Google Patents' legal-events table. I could not retrieve any reel/frame numbers, execution dates, or correspondent-of-record data for this patent within my search budget — the assignment databases are not fully indexed by the search interface available to me, and the queries returned only bibliographic aggregator pages. I therefore report only what is affirmatively documented, and I mark every gap explicitly rather than filling it in. I have not invented any reel/frame numbers, execution dates, or correspondent names. Where a field is unknown I say "not retrievable."

The one recorded ownership event that is independently documented is the 2019-03-01 assignment to the Chinese Academy of Sciences institute, which appears in the Google Patents legal-events timeline ("Assigned to NANJING INSTITUTE OF GEOGRAPHY & LIMNOLOGY. CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES — ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST (SEE DOCUMENT FOR DETAILS). Assignors: LI, WEI, QIN, Boqiang, WU, Tingfeng, ZHANG, YUNLIN, ZHU, Guangwei") and is corroborated by the CAS institutional repository (CAS IR GRID, handle 1471x/7248362), which lists 著作权人 (rights holder) as 中国科学院南京地理与湖泊研究所.

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Inventors

Pattern assessment: No unusual inventorship departure pattern. All five inventors are listed as assignors on the 2019-03-01 assignment to their own employer (the CAS institute), which is the ordinary employment-obligation assignment, not a departure-driven transfer. There is no record of any inventor assigning away from the institute, and no evidence of inventors leaving the institute within 12 months of filing. The CAS IR GRID record (country: 美国; status: 已授权 / granted) confirms the institute remains the rights holder of record in the institutional repository.

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Original assignee

Nanjing Institute of Geography & Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (中科院南京地理与湖泊研究所), Nanjing, China.

• Literal record note (do not harmonize): Google Patents lists the original assignee as "Nanjing Institute Of Geography," while the recorded 2019-03-01 assignment names "NANJING INSTITUTE OF GEOGRAPHY & LIMNOLOGY. CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES." These are naming variants of the same institution (its English rendering changed as the institute's full name was formalized), not two successive owners. This is the same institution under both labels.
• Primary line of business: Government/university-affiliated basic and applied research institute — limnology, lake environment, eutrophication and cyanobacteria-bloom science. It is not a commercial manufacturer.
• Product embodying the claims: None in commerce. The "product" here is the research system itself — the Taihu Lake monitoring network described in Example 1 (18 automatic monitoring stations, 30-minute temporal resolution, 69×69×5 computational grid, WRF-driven 3-day forecast). This is a deployed scientific monitoring platform operated by the institute, not a product sold or licensed on the market.
• Current status: Operating. A state-funded research institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; no insolvency, acquisition, or dissolution event is on record for the assignee. Its ownership of the patent is confirmed by both the 2019-03-01 assignment and the CAS IR GRID repository entry (submitted 2023-05-09).

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Assignment timeline

Formatted per the requested schema:

• Executed date not retrievable / recorded 2019-03-01 — Reel not retrievable / Frame not retrievable
  • Conveyance: Assignment (recorded as "ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNORS INTEREST")
  • Assignor: Li, Wei; Qin, Boqiang; Wu, Tingfeng; Zhang, Yunlin; Zhu, Guangwei (the five individual inventors)
  • Assignee: Nanjing Institute of Geography & Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
  • Correspondent: Not retrievable. I could not access the USPTO assignment cover sheet, so I cannot state the recording attorney/agent, firm, or address. This is a genuine data gap, not a null result — I am not prepared to guess a correspondent.
  • Context: Internal employment assignment (inventors → own employer). The recorded date coincides exactly with the 2019-03-01 US national-stage entry date of application 16/329,943, which is the normal sequencing when assignments are recorded concurrently with § 371 entry.

No other assignments are on record. There is no post-issuance assignment, no security agreement, no merger, no change-of-name, no license, and no release in the available record. The chain terminates at the original research institute and has done so since before the patent granted on 2022-08-02.

Per your instruction: the Assignment Center record was not retrievable by me, so I cannot certify that the above is the complete reel/frame chain. What I can state as a finding is that the only ownership event surfaced anywhere in the record — Google Patents legal events, CAS IR GRID, and patent-family citation pages — is the single 2019-03-01 inventor-to-institute assignment. There is no evidence of any subsequent transfer.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11402362
    2017 : Filed as PCT by five CAS inventors
    2019 : US national stage entry
         : Assignment recorded to CAS institute
    2021 : Pre-grant publication
    2022 : Patent granted to CAS institute

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

Naming caution honored: The assignee's institutional name is not a shell-entity tell. A government research institute holding its own employees' patent is the textbook non-NPE configuration, and I am grounding that on the 2019-03-01 recorded assignment plus the CAS repository record — not on the name alone.

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Verdict

Insufficient data — under your taxonomy this is the correct bucket, because the record contains only the original assignment (inventors → CAS institute, recorded 2019-03-01) and nothing further.

Justification: the sole recorded conveyance is the inventors' employment assignment of 2019-03-01 to Nanjing Institute of Geography & Limnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, corroborated by the CAS IR GRID repository entry (handle 1471x/7248362) naming 中国科学院南京地理与湖泊研究所 as rights holder; no post-issuance assignment exists, so all eight NPE signals are affirmatively absent, and the residual "insufficient data" call reflects the unrecoverable reel/frame and correspondent fields rather than any ambiguity about ownership. Substantively, this is a non-asserting government-research-institute patent — the "insufficient data" label is driven by the citation gap (no reel/frame, no correspondent), not by any suggestion of an NPE chain.

Caveats, stated plainly. (1) I could not reach USPTO Assignment Center directly; the reel/frame numbers, execution date, and correspondent for the 2019-03-01 assignment are not retrievable through the search interface I had. (2) A definitive chain-of-title confirmation requires a direct query at the Assignment Center search page below. (3) An absence of any additional recorded assignment is a search-based negative, not a certified clearance.

Verification link: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search by patent number 11402362 or application 16/329,943). Mirror index: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html.

I'll research the cited prior art for US 11,402,362. Let me run targeted searches.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 11,402,362 B2

Scope note up front: The task asks me to walk the "patent citations for 11402362" — i.e., the front-page (56) References Cited list that appears on the printed patent. My web-search–only tool access did not return that front-page citation list for US 11,402,362. The searches I ran for the patent number + "citations/references cited" returned OTHER patents' reference lists (e.g., US 11,344,413, US 9,911,718). I am therefore not going to fabricate a (56) list. What I can do authoritatively is analyze the prior art that US 11,402,362 itself identifies and discusses in its Background section — which I have verbatim from the patent text (and its WO 2018214190 A1 family member). Those are the references the applicant was aware of and distinguished, and they are the correct starting point for a § 102 analysis. I flag clearly below where my information ends.

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Part A — The three references named in the patent's own Background

US 11,402,362's Background section names exactly three pieces of prior art. All three are pre-2017-06-19 and are therefore available as § 102 prior art against the 2017-06-19 priority date.

Reference 1 — CN 103743700 A / CN 103743700 B (Chinese Application 201410023795.8)

"一种大型浅水湖泊蓝藻水华MODIS卫星高精度监测方法" / "High-precision monitoring method for cyanobacterial blooms in large shallow lake through MODIS satellite"

Brief description. A remote-sensing–only method for high-precision mapping of cyanobacteria bloom area in large shallow lakes (Lake Taihu context). It screens a bloom-identification index (the Floating Algae Index, FAI) that is insensitive to aerosol type/thickness; obtains a pure-pixel index threshold from 2000–2013 synchronous MODIS and Landsat TM/ETM+ imagery via gradient analysis; uses a Pixel Growth Algorithm (APA) to compute the bloom fraction inside mixed pixels; and thereby estimates the lake-wide bloom area and its spatial distribution.

§ 102 relevance. This is a remote-sensing monitoring reference. It is potentially anticipatory only of a claim narrowly drawn to (i) acquiring satellite remote-sensing data and (ii) deriving a bloom-area indicator by inversion — i.e., the remote-sensing sub-element of the '362 Claim 1 monitoring system. It does not disclose the automatic monitoring network, the manual surveying channel, the data processing system (server/array processor/workstation/router/firewall, dual-unit hot-standby), the database storage strategies, or the 3D numerical model. It therefore cannot anticipate the full independent system or method claim; at most it is a § 102 reference against a hypothetical dependent claim limited to satellite inversion of bloom area, and is stronger as a § 103 reference in combination.

Note / flag: Because this reference shares the '362 assignee, it is common-ownership prior art — relevant to § 103 obviousness (and potentially § 103(c)-type considerations), not a third-party anticipation. Treat the shared assignee as a fact to verify in the assignment record.

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Reference 2 — CN 201689088 U (Chinese Application 201020219363.1)

"用于蓝藻监测的浮标" / "Buoy for cyanobacteria monitoring"

Brief description. A monitoring buoy comprising a buoy carrier with a bottom anchor and onboard electronics, the electronics having a wireless video monitoring system, a water-quality monitoring system, and a power supply system. The video system includes a medium-speed dome camera and a wireless network video server; the water-quality system includes a wind-direction/wind-speed sensor and a multi-parameter water-quality monitor (probe below the waterline, main unit above) reporting to a remote control center by antenna; the power system uses solar panel + wind generator + wind/solar complementary controller + battery pack, all consumers powered from the battery.

§ 102 relevance. This is the closest reference to the "single automatic monitoring station" sub-structure recited in the '362 Claim 1. It discloses, in substance:

• a water-surface platform (buoy carrier + anchor) → maps to the "water surface supporting system";
• a power supply system (solar/wind/battery) → maps to the "power supply system";
• a data acquisition system drawing from a meteorological instrument (wind direction/speed), a water-quality instrument (multi-parameter monitor), and a video instrument (dome camera) → maps to the "data acquisition system… acquire data… from a meteorological instrument, a hydrological instrument, a water-quality instrument and a video instrument."

Where it falls short for § 102 anticipation: it does not disclose (a) a hydrological instrument as such; (b) the recited safety warning system (beacon lights, fluorescent bands, warning signs) — it has waterproof housings, not warning equipment; (c) a network of multiple such stations wirelessly linked; and, critically, (d) the entire data-processing side (data center, preprocessing, database storage strategies, 3D numerical model, assessment, public-platform publishing). So CN 201689088 U can anticipate only a claim drawn to the automatic monitoring station/buoy itself, not Claim 1 as a whole. It is a strong § 103 combination reference for the station sub-feature.

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Reference 3 — Yang Hongwei et al., "Taihu cyanobacteria bloom warning platform based on Internet of Things technique" (non-patent literature)

Cited in the '362 Background as "Yang Hongwei et al. disclosed a 'Taihu cyanobacteria bloom warning platform based on Internet of Things technique'."

Important limitation: I could not retrieve the full bibliographic details (journal, volume, year, DOI) of this NPL reference within my search budget. The patent gives only the author name and title. Do not treat the date/source as verified beyond the fact that the applicant cited it as pre-filing art.

Brief description. Per the '362 patent's own characterization: a multi-source-data platform designed on a four-layer Internet-of-Things architecture that can predict, three days in advance, the probability of a cyanobacteria-bloom warning, and publish the information over the Internet.

§ 102 relevance — the most relevant reference overall. Of the three, this is the one whose scope overlaps the method claim most broadly. It discloses the end-to-end chain of: multi-source monitoring data → prediction model → Internet publication of warnings. The '362 patent distinguishes it on four express grounds (verbatim from the specification):

1. It does not include a satellite receiving antenna — so its data are not real-time satellite remote-sensing data and it cannot automatically acquire satellite data in real time;
2. Its automatic monitoring station only details a chlorophyll sensor — no monitoring-indicator set, arrangement, parameters, or real-time monitoring/power/safety functions;
3. It mentions only a cyanobacteria-biomass model — no simulation of ecological processes (nutrient-salt circulation, sediment erosion/suspension, dissolved-oxygen dynamics);
4. It does not fully exploit the value of the monitoring data (no data mining).

§ 102 assessment. For anticipation, the applicant's four distinctions are meaningful: an anticipatory reference must disclose all limitations of a claim as arranged. Reference 3 lacks the satellite data-receiving antenna, the specific three-channel monitoring architecture, the preprocessing (temporal/spatial interpolation, 5×-variance outlier handling), the database storage strategies, and the 3D numerical model with material-migration/biochemical coupling. It therefore does not appear to anticipate the '362 independent system or method claim. It is, however, the strongest § 103 primary reference — a motivation-to-improve/combinability analysis starting from Reference 3 and adding Reference 1 (satellite inversion) and Reference 2 (buoy instrumentation) would be the natural obviousness challenge, since all three sit in the same Taihu cyanobacteria-monitoring art and all three share the same technical field and problem.

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Part B — Collateral reference surfaced in search (not confirmed as a '362 citation)

CN 101236159 A — "Buoys for cyanobacteria monitoring and early warning of cyanobacteria blooms"

A buoy carrying a buoy carrier, instrument room, monitoring sensor aggregate, communication antenna, and solar panel, with sensors for blue-green algae fluorescence, total-algae fluorescence, temperature, dissolved oxygen, and photosynthetically active radiation, powered by solar, and reporting to a monitoring center.

• This is a further example of a cyanobacteria-monitoring buoy and is potentially relevant to the automatic-monitoring-station sub-feature in the same manner as Reference 2. I could not confirm within my budget that CN 101236159 A appears in the (56) list of US 11,402,362 — I found it via a search for buoy-monitoring prior art, not from the '362 front page. Treat it as candidate prior art to check, not as a verified '362 citation.
• Google Patents: https://patents.google.com/patent/CN101236159A/en

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Part C — What I could NOT retrieve (be explicit)

1. The front-page (56) References Cited list of US 11,402,362 — neither the U.S. patent citations nor the foreign patent documents nor the NPL citations as printed on the grant. My searches returned reference lists belonging to other patents. This is the gap you specifically asked me to fill, and I am flagging it rather than filling it with invented entries.
2. The PCT/ISA search report for PCT/CN2017/089012 (the '362 international application) and the corresponding CN priority search report — these would name the examiner-cited art (the "X"/"A" category references), which is the highest-value input for a § 102 analysis.
3. Full bibliographic details of the Yang Hongwei NPL reference (journal, year, DOI).

Recommended retrieval, in priority order:

• USPTO Patent Center / Public PAIR for application 16/329,943 → "References Cited" and "Foreign References" (this is the authoritative (56) list).
• Google Patents → US11402362B2 → "Patent Citations" and "Cited By" tabs.
• WIPO Patentscope / Espacenet → WO 2018214190 A1 → "Search report" / "Cited documents."

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Part D — Bottom-line § 102 assessment against the (inferred) claims

Working from the claim architecture set out in the earlier sections (System Claim 1 + method claim, as inferred from the Summary of the Invention — verbatim claim text still unverified), the likely § 102 picture is:

Overall: On the record available to me, none of the identified references anticipates the full independent system or method claim of US 11,402,362 under § 102; the strongest attack is an obviousness (§ 103) combination of the Yang Hongwei IoT platform (primary) with CN 103743700 (satellite inversion) and CN 201689088 (instrumented buoy station) — all three being in the identical field of Taihu cyanobacteria-bloom monitoring and all three addressing the same data-acquisition-to-warning problem. The '362 patent's own novelty story rests on the seamless coupling of comprehensive three-channel monitoring with preprocessing/storage and a 3D ecological numerical model running autonomous rolling forecasts — a combination none of the three cited references discloses.

Caveat carried forward from the earlier sections: this analysis is built on the claim structure inferred from the specification. Verbatim independent-claim language and the actual (56) list must be pulled from USPTO Patent Center before these § 102/§ 103 conclusions are relied upon.

I'll ground this analysis in the prior art actually discussed in the patent's Background section, and try to pull detail on each reference.

Two of the three Background references are now confirmed with full bibliographic detail. Let me pull the third (Yang Hongwei IoT platform) and look for any citation list on the patent's front page.

Now let me try to retrieve the actual granted claim text and any front-page citation list — both are needed for a proper § 103 analysis.

Obviousness Analysis — U.S. Patent No. 11,402,362 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Built on the prior sections: bibliographic data, the "no litigation found" result, and the inferred claim architecture from my earlier work are treated as given and are not restated. One flag from that work now becomes load-bearing, so I repeat it in one line: I still have not verified the granted claim text verbatim. Everything below is an analysis against (a) the claim architecture inferred from the Summary of the Invention, and (b) the admitted-prior-art statements in the specification. Where a conclusion depends on exact claim scope, I say so.

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I. Evidentiary base

Three constraints on what follows:

1. The patent body is authoritative over search results (per your rule). I use it for what the applicant admits.
2. The three "Prior Art" references come from this patent's own Background section. That matters doctrinally — these are applicant-admitted prior art, which carries more weight than a third party's characterization. I verified all three against live sources.
3. I could not retrieve the granted claim set. A search targeting the claim language returned the pre-grant publication (US 2021/0293770 A1) text, plus the Justia mirror of the same specification. The granted claims are not in the record I have. This is a real limit, and I mark the affected conclusions.

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II. The three Background references — confirmed status

All three are § 102(a)(1)/pre-AIA § 102(b) printed publications or patents, published more than one year before the 2017-06-19 filing date. No § 102(b)(1) grace-period exception can rescue them, even though two are the inventors' own work.

Supplementary reference surfaced during verification (weaker dating confidence):
PROLIPHYC project report — https://core.ac.uk/download/48332330.pdf — describes a large-lake monitoring buoy (anchored, wave-damped, sensor basket) paired with the DYRESM–CAEDYM coupled hydrodynamic/ecological model for cyanobacteria on the Grangent reservoir, with data series from 2009–2010. It is therefore ≥ 2011 and pre-dates the 2017 filing. I cannot pin its exact publication date from the retrieved excerpt, so I use it as corroboration, not as a primary reference.

Note the symmetry: the patent's entire Background is a critique of NIGLAS's own earlier publications. That framing drives the whole analysis.

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III. The person of ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA)

A practitioner with a graduate degree in environmental science, limnology, or environmental engineering, plus 2–3 years of experience with water-quality monitoring instrumentation, remote sensing, and numerical water-quality modeling, working as part of a cross-disciplinary team that includes network/IT engineers for the data-center aspects. This is the level the specification itself assumes: it treats hydrodynamic modeling, SQL databases, TCP/IP local-area networking, and interpolation statistics as background competence, not as invention.

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IV. Governing framework: Graham factors and KSR

Under Graham v. John Deere, obviousness turns on (1) scope and content of the prior art, (2) differences between the prior art and the claims, (3) the PHOSITA's level of skill, and (4) secondary considerations. Under KSR Int'l v. Teleflex, a combination is obvious where (a) the prior art teaches or suggests the elements, (b) the elements are known and the combination yields predictable results, or (c) there is a "finite number of identified, predictable solutions" / a "design need or market pressure" pointing to the combination.

Two structural features of this patent strengthen an obviousness challenge considerably:

• The specification expressly admits the key modeling element is satisfiable with off-the-shelf art. It states: "The 3D numerical model used may be the existing models such as FVCOM, ELCOM-CAEDYM, and EFDC, or a model self-developed based on the theory of environmental fluid mechanics." That is a § 103 admission that the 3D-model element, at its claimed breadth, is met by known models.
• The specification admits the assessment algorithms are conventional. "The current assessment methods include expert scoring system, Carlson nutritional status index and probability of algae blooms, etc."

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V. Claim-element → prior-art mapping

Claim elements are as reconstructed from the Summary of the Invention in the previous section. Element-to-claim numbering is provisional pending granted-claim verification.

A. Independent System Claim (inferred claim 1)

B. Independent Method Claim (inferred)

Read-out: Yang 2011 alone discloses steps (1), (4) and (5) almost verbatim — including the three-day horizon that the patent's Example 1 uses. CN'700 alone discloses the remote-sensing channel and cloud-gap problem. CN'U088 alone discloses the entire buoy station minus the safety warning. The only element with no direct three-reference hit is the safety warning system (and the routine IT redundancy architecture).

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VI. Combination 1 (primary) — Yang 2011 + CN 103743700 + CN 201689088 U

This is the strongest § 103 challenge to the system claims.

Why the combination is motivated — and the motivation comes from the patent itself. The Background section is, functionally, a statement of the problem solved by combining exactly these three references:

• Yang 2011's deficiency #1: "it does not include satellite receiving antenna, the acquired data are not real-time satellite remote sensing data." → The remedy is to add a satellite data channel. CN 103743700 supplies it — and its entire technical contribution is precisely the high-precision MODIS retrieval (FAI index → pure-pixel threshold → APA sub-pixel area) that produces the patent's claimed "area of cyanobacteria bloom and intensity" remote-sensing indicators.
• Yang 2011's deficiency #2: the station description covers only a chlorophyll sensor; no instrument suite, no power supply, no safety functions. → CN 201689088 U supplies the complete station: buoy + anchor, solar/wind/battery power, camera, wind sensor, multi-parameter water-quality sensor, wireless back-haul.
• Yang 2011's deficiency: point-only buoy data "cannot record surface information of cyanobacteria blooms that is highly differentiated in space" — the patent's own words in the corresponding CN/WO text (WO2018214190A1; xjishu.com mirror). → This is the reason to combine a point sensor network with an areal satellite channel. The three-way "stereoscopic" architecture is the inevitable answer to a two-source complementarity that the applicant itself identified.

Under KSR, this is not merely "suitable" — it is the paradigm case: a combination of familiar elements (buoy network + satellite remote sensing + manual sampling + database + forecast model + web publishing) according to known methods, where the prior art teaches the desirability of the combination. The applicant's own Background is the strongest available evidence of that teaching.

Complementarity argument (spatial vs. temporal). The patent's stated advantage (2) — remote sensing gives areal distribution, automatic monitoring gives high-frequency temporal continuity, manual survey fills the analytical-chemical gaps — is a design rationale a PHOSITA would articulate from Yang 2011 + CN'U088 alone, without the patent.

Temporal rendering: Yang 2011's platform already achieves "蓝藻水华未来3天的平均预测精度达到了80%以上" (average 3-day prediction accuracy above 80%). Example 1 of the patent also forecasts three days. The performance level is therefore not a difference.

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VII. Combination 2 — the modeling and data-mining method steps

Primary combination: Yang 2011 + CN 103743700 + ELCOM-CAEDYM (or FVCOM/EFDC) + WRF + a commercial RDBMS (Oracle).

This combination targets the method claim steps (2)–(3).

Motivation. Yang 2011 forecasts bloom probability but, per the patent, encodes only a "cyanobacteria biomass model" with no ecological process simulation. The prior art is replete with coupled hydrodynamic–ecological models that do exactly what step (3) recites. The strongest evidence is the PROLIPHYC work, which pairs an anchored large-lake buoy with the DYRESM–CAEDYM coupled model — and CAEDYM's state variables are, essentially, the patent's list: phytoplankton/chlorophyll-a, zooplankton, dissolved inorganic P and N, dissolved oxygen, and BOD. In other words, a PHOSITA coupling a monitoring buoy to CAEDYM would arrive at "hydrodynamic model + superimposed material migration and transformation model having illumination, SS, algae growth, nutrient salt circulation and DO" without invention — and the patent itself concedes ELCOM-CAEDYM as an acceptable substitute.

Anatomy of the self-developed model — it is a re-derivation of known schemes. Independent of ELCOM-CAEDYM, the claimed equations map onto well-known published models:

• Eqs. (5)–(9): sigma-coordinate, free-surface primitive equations with hydrostatic pressure and an equation of state — the POM/ECOM/Blumberg–Mellor architecture.
• Eqs. (10)–(12): vertical eddy viscosity as $A_v = A_{v0}(1+m_0 Ri)^{m_1}$ with $Ri$ the Richardson number — the Mellor–Yamada level-2-type Richardson-number closure, with $m_0=0.1,\ m_1=-1$ in the conventional range. The patent's own values ($v_0 = 5.0\times10^{-6}$ m²/s, $l$ = Prandtl length) are textbook.
• Eqs. (13)–(14): bulk wind stress with $C_{WD}=0.001$ and quadratic bottom friction with $C_{SD}=0.003$ — standard bulk formulae with conventional coefficients.
• Eqs. (15)–(17) + SK₁–SK₆: advection–diffusion–reaction transport with a PAR attenuation law (pure water + algae + non-algal particulates) and source terms for CHLA, ZOOP, DTP, DTN, DO and BOD₅ — this is the CAEDYM/WASP/CE-QUAL-ICM family of water-quality kinetics, including the Michaelis–Menten nutrient uptake terms $\frac{DTP}{K_{TP}+DTP}$ and the temperature multipliers $\theta^{,T-20}$ that are ubiquitous in QUAL/WASP.
• WRF for the three-day meteorological forcing — admitted as a known weather-observation-and-forecasting model.

None of these are inventions; they are the standard toolkit, and the specification's own "may be the existing models such as FVCOM, ELCOM-CAEDYM, and EFDC" sentence forecloses an argument that the architecture of step (3) is novel.

Sub-combination targets within step (2):

• Temporal interpolation — linear, spline, or piecewise. All are classical; the claim (as written in the summary) recites a genus of three well-known alternatives, which under KSR is the textbook "finite number of identified, predictable solutions."
• Spatial interpolation — proximal point, Kriging, or IDW. Same. IDW (eq. 2) is a standard geostatistical interpolator; the "≥3 points within the search radius" is a routine robustness constraint.
• Outlier processing — the ā ± 5 SD test (eqs. 3–4) with replacement by the m−1 datum. A PHOSITA screening continuous sensor telemetry would use a rolling-mean/rolling-variance control band; ±5 SD is a routine, conservative choice, and "replace with the previous value" is the standard hold-last-value repair.

Database/storage sub-combination: Oracle as preferred RDBMS over SQL Server/Access; per-station sheet; 2D arrays stored row-wise; 3D arrays decomposed into K sheets per time node; image/video stored on disk with a path-index sheet. This is conventional relational schema design for gridded environmental data — the "array processor" storing binary blobs and the DB storing paths is the standard out-of-row LOB strategy.

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VIII. Dependent-claim-level analysis

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IX. The weakest links in the obviousness case

Being candid about where the challenge thins:

1. The "safety warning system" (beacon lights, fluorescent bands, warning signs) is not disclosed by any of the three references. This is the single cleanest gap. The rebuttal is that a navigational buoy on a large, navigated lake must be marked, and beacon lights/retroreflective bands/signage are the IALA-conventional means — so the element is a known solution to a known problem (collision avoidance), motivated a fortiori by CN 201020219363.1's own express worry that the equipment must withstand "the heavy rain of 50–100 mm and wind-force of 7–8 level." But if the granted system claim recites the safety warning system as an element requiring meaningful structural specificity, this is where a patentee would fight.
2. The satellite receiving antenna, as a discrete hardware element feeding a computer that performs inversion, is disclosed by none of the three references expressly. The counter is the ubiquity of Direct-Broadcast satellite ground stations and the fact that CN'700's own operation presupposes acquisition of MODIS data. Still, if the granted claim requires local real-time antenna reception (as opposed to archive download), an examiner/defendant needs a fourth reference — e.g., a NOAA/Fengyun HRPT ground-station reference or a satellite-broadcast data-reception patent.
3. Claim text not verified. Any conclusion above that depends on the granted claims reciting only the elements in the Summary is provisional. If the granted claims are narrower than the Summary suggests (e.g., if they recite the specific coupling of the assessment algorithm into the data center with the 3D model return path), the obviousness case must be re-run against that language.
4. PROLIPHYC dating. I have a data series ending 2010 but no verified publication date for the report itself. I would not rest primary reliance on it without a confirmed date and an accessible copy.

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X. Secondary considerations — mostly absent

The record does not supply strong objective indicia:

• No unexpected results are asserted. The specification claims "more accurate" computation results and "real-time receiving, rapid processing and timely publishing," but offers no comparative data against Yang 2011's 80% accuracy or against ELCOM-CAEDYM.
• No evidence of commercial success, industry praise, copying, or licensing was found in my searches.
• Long-felt need cuts against the patentee. The need was identified and addressed publicly by the same research group in 2011 (Yang) — the gap between the 2007 Wuxi water crisis and the 2017 filing was bridged by the group's own prior publications. A need that the same inventors publicly framed and partially solved in 2011 is not a long-felt unmet need for the 2017 incremental filing.
• The closest thing to a "teaching away" argument — the Background's criticism of Yang 2011 — is not teaching away. Under KSR, criticism of an existing design is evidence of the problem to be solved, not of a direction away from the solution. The applicant's own critique identifies the remedy (add real-time satellite reception; add ecological-process simulation; exploit the data).

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XI. Bottom line

Primary § 103 rejection (highest confidence on the method claims):

Yang 2011 in view of CN 103743700 A/B, further in view of CN 201689088 U, and optionally in view of a known coupled hydrodynamic–ecological model (ELCOM-CAEDYM, FVCOM, or EFDC — as the specification itself concedes) and WRF.

Yang 2011 supplies the three-layer monitoring network, remote-sensing water-quality inversion, wireless sensor network, three-day bloom forecast (~80% accuracy), and Internet publishing platform. CN'700 supplies the satellite remote-sensing bloom indicator channel (area and intensity of blooms) and the cloud/aerosol-gap problem whose solution the patent's spatial interpolation step addresses. CN'U088 supplies the entire automatic monitoring station: buoy + anchor, solar/wind/battery power, meteorological and multi-parameter water-quality sensors, video camera, and wireless back-haul to a control center. The coupled 3D model and meteorological forcing are admitted known art.

Motivation to combine is supplied three times over: (i) the applicant's own Background critique of each reference; (ii) the applicant's own express recognition that remote sensing and buoy monitoring are spatially and temporally complementary; and (iii) KSR's design-need/market-pressure rationale in a field (harmful algal bloom early warning) with acute regulatory and public-safety demand.

Elements the challenge must shore up with additional art: (a) the discrete satellite receiving antenna as local hardware; (b) the safety warning system (beacon lights, fluorescent bands, warning signs); (c) the dual-unit hot-standby server with heartbeat over a three-prong cable — trivially handled by generic IT-clustering references or by a judicial-notice/ Official Notice position, but not by the three references alone.

Confidence levels:

• High that the independent method claim, as inferred from the Summary, is obvious over Yang 2011 + CN'700 + CN'U088 + admitted art.
• Moderate-to-high that the independent system claim is obvious over the same combination, with the safety-warning-system element being the residual vulnerability.
• Moderate on all dependent-claim conclusions, because they turn on claim language I have not verified verbatim.
• High confidence in the reference identifications and dates themselves; all three were confirmed against primary/authoritative sources.

Two record observations, no legal conclusion drawn: (1) the three Background references include the patentee's own prior publications and the prior publications of two of the named inventors (Wu Tingfeng and Li Wei, co-authors of Yang 2011) — a fact that, being published more than one year before filing, places them squarely in the prior art notwithstanding common inventorship; (2) the system date in your task header (April 26, 2026) and the system date provided to me (September 29, 2026) do not match — I have not attempted to reconcile them, and nothing above depends on which is correct.