Obviousness

Under 35 U.S.C. § 103, a patent claim is considered obvious if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA). The obviousness determination is made based on the state of the art at the time of the patent application's filing. An examiner may combine multiple prior art references to establish obviousness if there is a motivation to do so, and such a combination would yield predictable results.

US patent 7069560, with a filing date of March 17, 1999, describes a highly scalable software-based architecture for communication and cooperation among distributed electronic agents, brokered by one or more facilitators. The patent highlights the ability of client agents to transmit arbitrarily complex goal expressions to a facilitator, which then constructs a goal satisfaction plan by delegating sub-goals to appropriate agents using an Interagent Communication Language (ICL).

Prior Art References:

The patent itself identifies several categories of prior art, including:

• Distributed Object Approach (DOOP): This approach, exemplified by CORBA's Object Request Broker (ORB), allows programs components to be spread across multiple machines. Clients can invoke methods on remote server objects transparently, without knowing the object's location, programming language, or operating system. However, the patent notes that DOOP interactions are fixed by explicitly coded instructions, making reuse difficult due and interactions are based on a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) style, which may not scale well.
• Mobile Objects (Mobile Agents): These are bits of code that can move to another execution site under their own programmatic control. Advantages include network bandwidth and parallelism. Disadvantages include programmatic specificity of interactions, lack of coordination support, and execution environment irregularities regarding programming languages.
• Blackboard Architectures: These typically allow multiple processes to communicate by reading and writing tuples from a global data store, offering a flexible framework for problem solving by a dynamic community of distributed processes. A disadvantage is that while it eliminates tightly bound interaction links, it doesn't provide programmatic control for referring to specific processes when practical.
• Agent-Based Software Engineering: The patent acknowledges that "several agent-based projects have helped to evolve the notion of facilitation." However, it criticizes existing agent-based technologies for being "very limited in the extent to which agents can specify complex goals or influence the strategies used by the facilitator." It also states that prior systems "are not sufficiently attuned to the importance of integrating human agents (i.e., users) through natural language and other human-oriented user interface technologies."
• SRI International's Open Agent Architecture (OAA®): The patent explicitly mentions that "The initial version of SRI International's Open Agent Architecture™ (“OAA®”) technology provided only a very limited mechanism for dealing with compound goals. Fixed formats were available for specifying a flat list of either conjoined (AND) sub-goals or disjoined (OR) sub-goals; in both cases, parallel goal solving was hardwired in, and only a single set of parameters for the entire list could be specified. More complex goal expressions involving (for example) combinations of different boolean connectors, nested expressions, or conditionally interdependent (“IF. THEN”) goals were not supported. Further, system scalability was not adequately addressed in this prior work."

Obviousness Analysis:

A PHOSITA in the field of distributed computing and agent-based systems, at the time of the invention (1999), would have been familiar with the advantages and limitations of the aforementioned prior art.

Combination 1: SRI International's Open Agent Architecture (OAA®) + General Knowledge of Logic Programming/AI Planning.

• OAA as Primary Reference: The patent itself identifies the initial version of OAA as closely related prior art, noting its limitations in handling complex compound goals. OAA already provided a framework for integrating heterogeneous software agents in a distributed environment, using a central "blackboard" server (facilitator) to manage tasks and agents that execute these tasks based on their capabilities and an Interagent Communication Language (ICL) for delegation.
• Motivation for Combination: A PHOSITA, recognizing the limitations of OAA's "fixed formats" for compound goals (i.e., only flat lists of AND/OR sub-goals, hardwired parallel solving, and single set of parameters for the entire list), would naturally seek to enhance its goal-handling capabilities. The stated problem in the prior art section of the '560 patent explicitly points to the lack of support for "more complex goal expressions involving (for example) combinations of different boolean connectors, nested expressions, or conditionally interdependent ('IF. THEN') goals."
• Obviousness of Combination: The patent states that "the content layer of the ICL preferably supports unification and other features found in logic programming language environments such as PROLOG." It also mentions "the goals may take the form of compound goal expressions composed using operators similar to those employed by PROLOG, that is, the comma for conjunction, the semicolon for disjunction, the arrow for conditional execution, etc." Given that OAA already utilized an ICL and a facilitator for goal delegation, and that PROLOG was a well-known logic programming language at the time, it would have been obvious to a PHOSITA to incorporate PROLOG-like syntax and semantics for expressing complex goals within OAA's ICL. This would allow for arbitrary nesting, different boolean connectors (AND, OR, NOT, conditional execution), and the dynamic specification of parameters for individual sub-goals, directly addressing the identified shortcomings of the earlier OAA. The concept of a facilitator constructing a "goal satisfaction plan" from these complex expressions would be a natural extension of its existing role in delegating tasks based on agent capabilities.

Combination 2: Blackboard Architectures + Agent-Based Systems with Facilitators + Concepts of Distributed Objects (for scalability).

• Blackboard Architectures as Primary Reference: Blackboard architectures provided a "flexible framework for problem solving by a dynamic community of distributed processes" and offered a solution to "eliminating the tightly bound interaction links". This aligns with the '560 patent's goal of flexible, dynamic configurations of autonomous agents.
• Agent-Based Systems with Facilitators: The prior art recognized the promise of agent-based systems for "flexible, fault-tolerant, distributed problem solving" and the evolution of the "notion of facilitation." The '560 patent builds on this, where facilitators are responsible for coordinating agent communications and cooperative problem-solving.
• Motivation for Combination: A PHOSITA would be motivated to combine the flexibility of blackboard architectures (for dynamic communication and shared data) with the coordination capabilities of facilitator-based agent systems. The disadvantage of blackboard architectures, as noted in the patent, was the lack of programmatic control for referring to specific processes when practical. Incorporating a facilitator, as described in agent-based systems, provides this layer of controlled delegation. Furthermore, while the initial OAA faced scalability limitations, the general concept of distributed objects (like CORBA with ORBs) was known to enable components to be spread across multiple machines. A PHOSITA would seek to address the scalability concerns of a single facilitator by exploring distributed facilitator architectures, as suggested in the patent's own description of preferred embodiments (e.g., hierarchical or replicated facilitators).
• Obviousness of Combination: The '560 patent describes a facilitator that "may also provide a global data store for its client agents, allowing them to adopt a blackboard style of interaction." This direct statement suggests that combining elements of blackboard architectures with a facilitator-based agent system was an explicit consideration. Extending this to address scalability by distributing the facilitator's functionality or employing multiple facilitators, drawing on established principles of distributed systems (like those underpinning distributed objects to avoid single points of failure and bottlenecks), would have been a predictable design choice for a PHOSITA.

In summary, the core inventive step of US7069560 lies in the specific enhancement of agent-based communication to handle arbitrarily complex goal expressions and improved scalability in facilitator-based architectures. However, the patent explicitly acknowledges prior art, particularly its own "initial version of SRI International's Open Agent Architecture™ (“OAA®”) technology," which already laid much of the groundwork. The deficiencies identified in this prior OAA (limited compound goal handling, scalability) would have prompted a PHOSITA to seek improvements. The solutions presented, such as using PROLOG-like syntax for complex goals and exploring distributed facilitator architectures, would have been obvious adaptations or combinations of known techniques (logic programming, distributed computing principles) to address these known problems in agent-based systems.