US 9921078

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

Let me check for any litigation, PTAB, or 2026 Federal Circuit activity specifically tied to this patent, and confirm the family/claim set.

Let me pull the complete claim set (including the independent system/CRM claims) to give an accurate claim-by-claim overview.

US 9,921,078 B2 — Verification and Summary

Note on scope of search: I searched for this exact number (9921078, and the associated application/publication identifiers) against available web-indexed sources, including Google Patents, Justia Patents, FreePatentsOnline, patents-review.com, and USPTO-hosted documents (PTAB/PTActs). I did not find any Federal Circuit docket entry, appeal, or 2026 CAFC activity tied to US 9,921,078, and I found no IPR/PGR petition or district-court complaint naming this patent. I cannot confirm the absence of such activity authoritatively — no 2026 CAFC docket for this patent surfaced in searchable results, and I do not have direct access to PACER/CM-ECF or the CAFC docket to verify. Treat any statement that this patent has (or has not) been litigated or appealed in 2026 as unverified.

Bibliographic data (from the patent front matter / Google Patents record)

Abstract (as published)

An exemplary method includes a personal navigation assistance system detecting an upcoming trip of a user to a destination, accessing data associated with the upcoming trip from a plurality of disparate information sources, aggregating the accessed data, generating navigational assistance content for the upcoming trip based on the aggregated data, and providing the navigational assistance content to a computing device for presentation to the user. In certain examples the aggregated data includes real-time parking space availability information, and the navigational assistance content includes parking assistance content generated based on that information. Corresponding systems and methods are also described.

Plain-language overview of the independent claim(s)

Claim 1 (independent — method). A machine-implemented method with five steps:

1. Detect an upcoming trip of a user to a destination — and this detection must be based on at least one of: the user's travel-pattern information, an email communication associated with the user, a text-message communication associated with the user, or the user's calendar information. (This "inference of the trip from personal data" limitation is the notable narrowing point versus the generic concept.)
2. Access data about that trip from a plurality of disparate information sources (e.g., traffic, weather, flight status, surveillance, parking availability, navigation guidance, vehicle records, map data — sources that are physically/logically separate or run by different entities).
3. Aggregate the accessed data, where the aggregated data includes real-time parking-space availability information.
4. Generate navigational assistance content for the trip based on the aggregated data, the content including parking assistance content generated from the real-time parking-space availability information.
5. Provide that content to a computing device for presentation to the user.

Other independent claims: The patent is a typical three-statutory-class set, with claim 1 as the method claim and additional independent claims directed to a system and to a non-transitory computer-readable medium / computing-device side (i.e., the system operating the navigation management facility, and/or the computing device that receives and displays the navigational assistance content). Caution: the publicly indexed claim text I could retrieve was truncated after claim 11, so I could not verify the exact wording, numbering, or dependency structure of the remaining claims (approximately claims 12–20). I know from the specification (FIGS. 9–10, "Corresponding systems and methods are also described") that system and computer-readable-medium claims exist, but I should not state their precise language as fact. If exact independent-claim language is required, the definitive source is the issued patent's claim set at USPTO Patent Center / Google Patents — not this summary.

Representative dependent-claim themes (claims 2–11, verified text)

• Claim 2: Detecting a change in real-time parking availability during the trip and pushing updated content to a mobile device.
• Claim 3: Aggregating data on multiple geographically proximate parking zones and identifying the zone where the user is more likely to find a space; outputting a parking suggestion.
• Claims 4–7: GUI features — real-time image of a vehicle currently parked in the space / real-time image of the space; a map showing the geographic layout of parking spaces with availability indicators; the "near expiry map" showing remaining time on parking meters; graphical objects representing parked vehicles.
• Claim 8: Incorporating weather forecast data into the parking suggestion.
• Claim 9: Detecting that the user's vehicle is parked, recording the parking-space location, and providing "parking space return information" to help the user find the vehicle afterward.
• Claim 10: Offering in-space vehicle services (e.g., maintenance/detailing) while the vehicle is parked.
• Claim 11 (truncated): Crowd-sourced determination of airport security-line wait times used in the navigational assistance content.

Uncertainty flags

• No verified 2026 CAFC docket, appeal, or PTAB proceeding for US 9,921,078 was located. This is a negative search result, not a confirmed absence.
• Claims ~12–20 (independent system/CRM claims and their dependents) could not be retrieved verbatim; their content is stated generally and should be verified against the official claim set.
• The "Expired – Fee Related" status and the 2034-12-22 anticipated-expiration date are as listed on Google Patents and are the source's characterization, not a legal determination.

Sources: Google Patents record for US 9,921,078 B2 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US9921078/en); Justia Patents claim text for US 2017/0045373 A1 (https://patents.justia.com/patent/20170045373); FreePatentsOnline publication copy (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2017/0045373.html).

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 9921078 across the sources you mentioned.

Initial searches returned unrelated results. Let me search more specifically.

Let me search the litigation-specific databases and try alternate formats of the patent number.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 9,921,078

Bottom line

I found no known litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 9,921,078 ("Personal navigation assistance systems and methods"). Searches of the sources you identified, plus general web searches keyed to the exact number, returned no district court complaints, declaratory judgment actions, CAFC appeals, ITC investigations, or PTAB proceedings naming this patent.

I want to be explicit about the limits of this conclusion rather than overstate it:

• I was not able to directly query the Unified Patents litigation portal case list, PACER, or the CAFC docket APIs — my searches returned only general web results, and several of my planned targeted queries (including unifiedpatents.com litigation "9921078" and a Verizon-keyed query) were cut off before completing.
• Results returned by search engines for the string "9921078" were dominated by unrelated matter: a PCT publication WO 9921078 A2 (cited on the face of an unrelated patent), a Norwegian regulatory invoice number, and other coincidental matches. None involve this patent.
• Several results referenced different patents with a "'078" shorthand (e.g., U.S. Patent No. 12,133,078; U.S. Patent No. 11,937,145's neighbor patents; the "'078 patent" in an In re Bill of Lading discussion). None of these are U.S. 9,921,078.

Per your instruction not to auto-correct or conflate identifiers, I have not treated any of those look-alikes as the patent in question.

Patent identification (for the record, verified against the authoritative full text)

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9921078/en (fetched 2026-09-24)

Litigation table

Recommended next steps to confirm "no litigation"

Since my tool access was truncated, and litigation data is best confirmed against primary dockets, I recommend verifying directly:

1. Unified Patents litigation portal — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist (search by patent number).
2. PACER / CourtListener RECAP — search "9,921,078" and "9921078", noting that RECAP keyword search covers only harvested documents, so a negative is not conclusive.
3. CAFC docket — search for any appeal originating from a case asserting this patent.
4. USPTO Patent Center / PTAB — check for IPR, PGR, reissue, or reexamination; the Google Patents record lists none, and the "Expired – Fee Related" status (failure to pay maintenance fees) is itself a signal that the patent was likely not being actively asserted — patent owners rarely abandon a patent mid-monetization campaign.
5. Commercial docket databases (Darts-ip, Lex Machina, RPX) for a comprehensive sweep.

Caveat

Because I could not complete live queries against the primary litigation databases, this "no known litigation" finding is provisional. I have no high-confidence basis to assert affirmatively that litigation exists, and I will not fabricate a case number, court, or party. If you can supply a Docket Navigator, Lex Machina, or Unified Patents export for U.S. 9,921,078, I can analyze and format any hits into the requested table.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 9,921,078: 0 (0 active / 0 claims invalidated / 0 claims sustained / 0 settled / 0 institution denied). The USPTO Open Data Portal structured block supplied with this assignment returns no AIA trial proceedings, and independent web searches surfaced nothing contradicting that — no IPR, PGR, or CBM docket naming this patent, its continuation parent, or its assignee as patent owner. The bottom line for a defendant: there is no PTAB record to lean on and no claim-level estoppel or cancellation to exploit. Whatever invalidity case you build on US 9,921,078 has to be built from scratch — but the absence of any challenge is itself a meaningful signal about how (and whether) this patent is being asserted.

Proceedings overview detail

Note on the "Expired - Fee Related" status: the USPTO record shows the patent as lapsed for failure to pay maintenance fees, even though the nominal term runs to 2034-12-22. That is a separate and materially relevant defensive fact (discussed below), distinct from any PTAB outcome. It is an assumption-not-conclusion field per the source, so verify maintenance-fee status in Patent Center before relying on it.

No proceedings to report

There is no proceeding number, petitioner, panel, institution decision, final written decision, settlement, or appeal to summarize because the record contains no AIA trial. I am deliberately not generating placeholder docket numbers (e.g., "IPR2019-XXXXX") — inventing them would be exactly the failure mode this assignment warns against.

What I checked and what I found:

• Structured ODP block (canonical): zero AIA trial proceedings. This is the authoritative list per the instructions.
• Web search for "9921078" / "9,921,078" + IPR/PTAB: returned no proceedings on this patent. Hits were unrelated patents sharing the digits "9921078" (e.g., WO 9921078 A2, a Microchip reissue citation, a Norwegian invoice line) and unrelated IPRs on different patents ('991, '992, '971, '078 from other families).
• Common obvious-hits false friends: the "Ozmo Licensing" / Unified Patents IPR against U.S. 9,264,991 (Ethertronics/Ozmo), the LMK Technologies '992 IPR, and the "Sudenga/Global" '078 litigation are not this patent. Do not cite them.
• I could not confirm any district court assertion of US 9,921,078 in which an IPR would ordinarily follow. I did not find a litigation campaign, a defensive aggregator (Unified Patents, RPX, IPR-focused funds) filing, or a Federal Circuit appeal referencing this patent. I state that as a negative finding from limited search, not as a certified exhaustive clearance.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all claims UNTESTED. No claim of US 9,921,078 has been canceled, confirmed, disclaimed, or narrowed by any PTAB certificate. There is no surviving-claims list to give you because no claims were ever at issue in a trial. Unlike a hardened patent that has "survived two IPRs," this patent has never been tested — and unlike a patent whose independent claims were canceled, nothing here is dead on arrival. Practitioner translation: you get no free kill, but you also inherit no adverse Board findings, no claim-construction rulings, and no prosecution-disclaimer record created by an IPR.

Estoppel landscape: essentially empty, but note the asymmetry. Because no IPR/PGR was ever instituted, there is no § 315(e)(2) estoppel binding any petitioner-privy. That means you are free to raise any § 102/§ 103 ground, in the PTAB or in court, without worrying about what some earlier petitioner already litigated. The flip side: there is equally no estoppel protecting you, and no prior Board analysis of the claims to borrow. If you are weighing an IPR, the calculus is clean — no Fintiv-overlap baggage from a prior petition, and the § 325(d) and § 314(a) discretionary-denial arguments that plague serial filings simply do not exist here.

Pattern signals: none. No repeat-petitioner signature, no patent-owner appeal history, no aggregator footprint. Combined with the assignee profile — Verizon Patent and Licensing Inc., an operating-company portfolio rather than a litigating NPE — and the Expired - Fee Related status, the practical read is that this is a dormant, probably unasserted asset. Patents that are being actively asserted at scale attract IPRs almost mechanically; this one has attracted none, and it has lapsed for non-payment of maintenance fees. Both facts cut in a defendant's favor.

The real defensive point may be the lapsed status, not the PTAB. If the "Expired - Fee Related" entry is accurate and no petition to revive was granted, the patent cannot ground a live infringement claim for the lapse period and its enforceability/recoverability story gets complicated. That is a Patent Center/PTO record question, not something inferable from a PTAB docket.

Recommended next steps

• Treat this as "no PTAB activity exists" — say so plainly in any opinion letter. The absence is a signal: no challenger has bothered, and the patent has lapsed for fee non-payment, which is inconsistent with an aggressive assertion program.
• Verify the maintenance-fee lapse in USPTO Patent Center before relying on it. Pull the fee-history/transaction record for US 15/339,714 and check for any 37 C.F.R. §§ 1.362–1.378 petition to revive or unintentional-delay revival. "Expired - Fee Related" in a Google Patents mirror is a status assumption and can be stale. If it is unrebutted, it belongs at the top of your non-infringement/enforceability memo. Confirm via Patent Center and the USPTO Assignment record.
• Preserve your § 102/§ 103 runway. Since no IPR was instituted, you have the full field of art available with no estoppel and no preclusive claim constructions. If you do file an IPR, note that no statutory 1-year institution-decision clock or trial deadline is running yet — it starts only upon institution, and the FWD is due within one year of the institution notice under § 316(a)(11).
• If you find an assertion or demand letter citing this patent, re-run the docket check at PTAB E2E / PTAB Center and CourtListener for any newly filed IPR or CAFC appeal before finalizing your position. This report reflects the record as of 2026-09-29, and the source block is dated 2026-09-24.

Caveat: I found no proceeding to quote, so I have quoted none. Where I could not confirm something (any district court suit, any lapsed-fee revival, any unpublished or very recently filed petition the ODP ingest may not yet reflect), I have said so explicitly rather than filling the gap with a fabricated docket number.

I'll research the assignment record for US 9921078 across the suggested sources.

US 9,921,078 B2 — Assignment / Ownership Reconstruction

Patent: US 9,921,078 B2, "Personal navigation assistance systems and methods"
Priority: 2014-12-22 (parent app. 14/579,989) · Continuation filed: 2016-10-31 (app. 15/339,714) · Granted: 2018-03-20 · Anticipated expiration: 2034-12-22 · Status: Expired – Fee Related
Source of record: Google Patents legal events (https://patents.google.com/patent/US9921078/en)

Data-access caveat up front: I was unable to retrieve the specific reel/frame identifiers or the correspondent of record for this patent's assignment from the Assignment Center in this session. The findings below rest on the Google Patents legal-events table (which mirrors the USPTO assignment record) and the published application. Where a field is unknown, I say so rather than guess. The chain should be re-verified directly at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search by patent number 9921078).

Inventors

• No unusual patterns detected. There is a single inventor, and no evidence in the record of inventor departure, co-inventor attrition, or a cluster of inventors leaving within 12 months of filing. The "all inventors departing the original assignee before a fire-sale" tell does not apply — there is no fire-sale in the chain at all.

Original assignee

Verizon Patent and Licensing Inc. — the entity named on the issued patent and the current assignee of record.

• Primary line of business: Verizon Patent and Licensing Inc. is the patent-holding subsidiary of Verizon Communications Inc. It is an operating-company patent vehicle, not a licensing-only shell — it sits inside a large operating telecommunications carrier.
• Product embodiment: This is a judgment call and I will be explicit about it. Verizon operates consumer navigation/location services and a smart-city/curbside data business, and the claims (aggregating parking-availability, flight-status, and crowd-sourced security-line data into trip guidance) are plausibly practiced within Verizon's services. However, I have not verified a specific commercial Verizon product that practices these claims, so I do not assert embodiment as fact.
• Current status: Operating (parent, Verizon Communications Inc., is a NYSE-listed going concern). No bankruptcy, dissolution, or divestiture of this patent is evidenced in the record.

Assignment timeline

Only one recorded assignment exists in this chain, and it is the original inventor→company assignment. There are no post-issuance transfers.

• 2016-10-31 (executed) / recorded 2016-10-31 — Reel/Frame not retrieved
  • Conveyance: Assignment (Assignment of Assignors' Interest)
  • Assignor: Allen Moore
  • Assignee: Verizon Patent and Licensing Inc.
  • Correspondent: not retrieved — I could not pull the attorney/agent of record from the Assignment Center for this entry. No recurrence of any correspondent can therefore be flagged.
  • Context: Routine employee/inventor assignment to the operating company, executed and recorded on the same day the continuation application (15/339,714) was filed.

Finding: Beyond this single original assignment, the Assignment Center record for US 9,921,078 reflects no subsequent recorded conveyance (no assignment, security agreement, merger, change of name, license, or release). That means the patent has remained with the original assignee, Verizon Patent and Licensing Inc., from filing to the present. The patent's Expired – Fee Related status is consistent with a patent that was never monetized or asserted and was simply allowed to lapse for non-payment of maintenance fees.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 9921078
    2014 : Parent application filed by Allen Moore
    2016 : Continuation filed
         : Assigned to Verizon Patent and Licensing Inc
    2018 : Patent issued
    2034 : Anticipated expiration

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — Not present. No transfer to any "IP / Patents / Licensing / Holdings / Ventures" LLC is recorded. The only assignee is the original operating-company vehicle (Verizon Patent and Licensing Inc.), named on the face of the patent at issue.
2. Known asserter in the chain — Not present. No assignee in the record matches the Acacia / Marathon / IV / IPNav / Wi-LAN / Conversant / Vringo / Pendrell / MPHJ / Round Rock / Spangenberg lists or any RPX/Unified high-frequency-plaintiff directory. The sole assignee is Verizon Patent and Licensing Inc.
3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — Not present / insufficient data. The chain has only one link and I could not retrieve its correspondent; with a single entry, recurrence is impossible to establish regardless.
4. Cascading transfers — Not present. No consecutive assignments through chained LLCs exist; there is exactly one recorded assignment, dated 2016-10-31.
5. Pre-litigation transfer — Not present. The sole assignment (2016-10-31) precedes issuance by ~17 months and is the standard inventor→employer filing-date assignment, not a standing/venue-clearing transfer. No infringement suit naming this patent was found against which a transfer could be measured.
6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — Not present. No Chapter 7/11 sale, no reorganized-debtor assignee, no Kodak/Nortel-style transaction in the record.
7. Privateering — Not present. No operating-company→NPE transfer; Verizon has not divested this patent into an assertion vehicle per the record.
8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — Not present. The chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN. It simply terminates at the original operating-company assignee.

Verdict

Insufficient data — no records beyond the original assignment.

Justification: The USPTO/Google Patents legal-events record shows exactly one assignment — Allen Moore → Verizon Patent and Licensing Inc., executed and recorded 2016-10-31 (the continuation filing date) — and no post-issuance conveyance. Per the rubric, a chain consisting of only the original assignment is classified Insufficient data, and here that finding is also substantively affirmative: the patent stayed with an operating-company assignee for its entire life and was allowed to lapse (Expired – Fee Related), with no NPE, no shell-entity transfer, and no litigation-arranged transfer anywhere in the record. Reel/frame and correspondent could not be retrieved this session and should be confirmed directly.

Verify at: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 9921078) — cross-check Google Patents legal events at https://patents.google.com/patent/US9921078/en.

Note on process: I could not confirm the specific reel/frame numbers or the recording correspondent. If you can supply the Assignment Center reel/frame for the 2016-10-31 entry, I can complete the correspondent-recurrence analysis and validate whether that attorney of record appears on other Verizon-issued patents in this tracker.

I'll research US 9921078 and its cited prior art references.

Let me search more specifically for the cited references and family members.

Let me search for the specific citation list on patent databases.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 9,921,078 B2 ("Personal navigation assistance systems and methods")

1. Confirmed bibliographic record (from the authoritative full text)

Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9921078/en

Important procedural point for a §102 analysis: US 9,921,078 is a continuation of US 14/579,989 (US 9,547,988 B2). It therefore has the same specification and the same effective priority date (2014-12-22) as the parent. Any art that anticipates/rejects the parent claims will hit the child claims identically, because the disclosure is the same. Conversely, this also means that art with a date between 2014-12-22 and 2016-10-31 is not §102(a) art against this patent — the 2014-12-22 priority date controls.

2. Critical limitation on this deliverable — I must flag it rather than fabricate

The USPTO "References Cited"/"Patent Citations" list for US 9,921,078 could not be retrieved from the sources available to me, and the authoritative full text you supplied contains no "References Cited" section.

The Google Patents HTML I was given (and the search results I could obtain) does not include the front-page list of examiner-cited U.S. patent documents, foreign patent documents, or non-patent literature for US 9,921,078. I searched for:

• the Google Patents citation section for US 9,921,078 / US 2017/0045373,
• the parent US 9,547,988 citation list,
• Justia/patents-review "references cited" entries.

What came back was not the back-citation list of this patent. Specifically, the hits were:

• USPTO PTAB IPR petitions citing Knockeart and Fowler — but those petitions are directed at U.S. Patent No. 9,528,843, a different patent (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1493335](/patent/1493335)/...). They are irrelevant to US 9,921,078.
• EP/PCT search reports citing US 2013/0099941, US 2016/073298, US 2015/264627, US 2013/293582, US 2018/089899, etc. — none of these is a citation in this patent's file.
• A Google Patents "Patent Citations (8)" table on the page for US 2022/0146265 A1 (a different, later patent that cites US 9,547,988 forward), listing US 2009/0287408, US 2012/0310520, US 2016/0238401, etc. Those are that patent's citations — not US 9,921,078's.

Do not treat any of the above as the prior-art-of-record for US 9,921,078. Doing so would be exactly the kind of number/identity mixing the operating rules prohibit. I am deliberately not labeling any reference as "anticipating claim X under §102(b)" because I have not verified that any such reference is actually cited in this patent, nor verified its disclosure against the claim text.

3. What I can state with confidence

3.1 The patent's own family (not prior art, but relevant to scope)

• US 9,547,988 B2 — "Personal navigation assistance systems and methods," Allen Moore, Verizon, granted 2017-01-17, filed 2014-12-22. Same disclosure as US 9,921,078 (parent case).
• US 2017/0045373 A1 — pre-grant publication of US 9,921,078.
• https://patents.google.com/patent/US9547988

3.2 The claims at issue (from the specification/abstract supplied)

The disclosure and claim set are directed to:

1. Detecting an upcoming trip of a user to a destination (e.g., from email/calendar/travel-booking data);
2. Accessing data from a plurality of disparate information sources (traffic, weather, flight status, surveillance, parking-space availability, navigation guidance, vehicle records, geographic/map, crowd-sourced);
3. Aggregating that data;
4. Generating navigational assistance content based on the aggregated data (including parking assistance content based on real-time parking space availability, e.g., smart-parking-meter data); and
5. Providing the content to a computing device for presentation.

The independent claims correspond to a method (FIG. 9), a computing-device method (FIG. 10), plus system/CRM counterparts. This is the framework a §102 analysis must map onto.

3.3 Verification status of the references in §2

None verified as citations in US 9,921,078 — see above.

4. How to obtain the actual prior art of record (recommended next step)

To do a defensible §102 mapping I need the verified citation list. The reliable routes:

1. Google Patents → US 9,921,078 → "Patent Citations" / "Cited By" sections
   (the fetched page omitted these; the live page contains them). Direct URL: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9921078/en
2. USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter — application 15/339,714. Look at:
   • the References Cited listing (Form PTO-892 "Notice of References Cited" and the "References Cited" box on the face of the printed patent),
   • the IDS (Information Disclosure Statement) and file-wrapper contents.
   • https://ppubs.uspto.gov / https://patentcenter.uspto.gov
3. Global Dossier / Espacenet — for any foreign-family search-report art (though this appears to be a US-only family).
4. USPTO Assignment & PatentCenter — https://assignment.uspto.gov

Once that list is in hand, each reference can be mapped to the independent claims using the limitation structure in §3.2 (detect → access disparate sources → aggregate → generate parking assistance content from real-time availability → output).

5. Honest bottom line

I could not identify "the most relevant prior art for US 9,921,078" as cited in that patent's file, because the patent's own References-Cited/Patent-Citations list was not available in the sources I could retrieve, and the search hits that superficially matched were citations belonging to other patents (e.g., the US 9,528,843 IPRs citing Knockeart/Fowler, and the citation table of US 2022/0146265 A1). Reporting any of those as "the prior art for US 9,921,078" would misrepresent the record.

If you can supply (a) the printed patent's face-page "References Cited" list or the live Google Patents "Patent Citations" table for US9921078, or (b) the PTO-892/file-wrapper for application 15/339,714, I will immediately produce the requested element-by-element table — for each reference: full citation, publication/filing date, brief description, and the specific claim(s) it potentially anticipates under 35 U.S.C. §102(a)/(b) — with the priority-date analysis (2014-12-22) applied to confirm each reference qualifies as prior art.

I am explicitly not asserting a §102 conclusion for any uncited reference, in line with the rule against fabricating identifiers or conclusions.

I'll research this patent's prior-art citations and claim set before building the § 103 analysis.

Let me pull the cited prior-art references and the actual claim set for US 9,921,078.

Let me try to retrieve the front-page references and the claim text more directly.

Important evidentiary caveat (read first)

I need to flag a limitation before analyzing, per my operating rules:

The authoritative page text supplied for US 9,921,078 B2 contains no "Prior Art"/citations table — the Google Patents-record content provided includes only:

• Prior art keywords: "information," "parking," "user," "computing device," "trip"
• Prior art date (assumed): 2014-12-22
• Classifications (G01C 21/3685; G08G 1/14x; G08G 1/0967, etc.), and
• The specification/abstract, truncated before the claims.

My searches (including targeted queries for the front-page "(56) References Cited" list) did not return the examiner-cited references for this patent. I therefore cannot tell you the actual prior art the examiner considered, and I will not fabricate reference numbers or citations. What follows is (a) a reconstruction of claim scope from the abstract and specification, and (b) an illustrative § 103 analysis using references I could actually verify in search results, each flagged by date-confidence. Treat the combinations as analytical frameworks, not as a certified invalidity opinion.

1. Claim scope (reconstructed)

US 9,921,078 is a continuation of Ser. No. 14/579,989 (issued as US 9,547,988 B2); both share the 2014-12-22 priority date and the same specification ("Priority Applications" / "Family Applications," https://patents.google.com/patent/US9547988). Claim language is therefore near-identical across the two. From the abstract and Fig. 9–10, the independent method claim recites:

1. detecting an upcoming trip of a user to a destination;
2. accessing data associated with the upcoming trip from a plurality of disparate information sources;
3. aggregating the accessed data;
4. generating, based on the aggregated data, navigational assistance content; and
5. providing the content to a computing device for presentation to the user.

The specification elaborates the following likely dependent/embodied limitations: aggregated data includes real-time parking space availability information; content includes parking assistance content; a "near expiry map" with per-meter expiry indicators and a current-location indicator (Fig. 5); personalization via user profile (vehicle size, preferred parking style/cost, etc.); dynamic updating when source data changes mid-trip; timing delivery at a route decision point/juncture; return-to-parked-vehicle guidance; in-vehicle services (oil change, rock-chip repair) and automatic payment; and detecting the trip via email/calendar analysis.

A separate independent claim (the computing-device side, per the sibling's claim text — "...providing, by the computing device, the navigational assistance content for display in one or more graphical user interface view...") covers the device-receiving-and-displaying counterpart.

POSITA (2014): a bachelor's degree in CS/EE or equivalent, plus ~2 years in mobile navigation, POI, and telematics/parking-sensor systems, familiar with GPS, map/routing APIs, and networked sensor data feeds.

2. Verified reference points I can actually cite

I could not verify a single reference mapping to the "airport security-line crowd-sourced wait time" and "email/calendar trip detection" features. Those are the least-supported elements below.

3. § 103 framework

Apply Graham v. John Deere factors (scope/content, differences, PHOSITA level, secondary considerations) as reworked by KSR Int'l v. Teleflex (obvious to try; predictable combination; market/predictable-variation motivation; "a court must ask whether the improvement is more than the predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions").

The core invention is, functionally, a data-aggregation and routing layer over pre-existing components (routing engines, sensor-equipped parking infrastructure, weather/flight feeds, and mobile GUIs). Under KSR, aggregating known information sources to drive a known output (a parking/navigation suggestion) is a classic predictable combination.

4. Proposed combinations and motivations

Combination A — Parking-availability prediction art + a conventional turn-by-turn navigation system.
Teaches: elements 1–5 where the "aggregated data" is parking data and the "navigational assistance content" is a parking suggestion. US 8,994,560 claim 1 already predicts availability, matches user-selected space attributes, and claim 4 sends directions to that space. The patent's own background concedes conventional systems provide "turn-by-turn driving directions."
Motivation: A POSITA seeking to reduce the well-known problem of drivers circling for parking would combine an availability-prediction engine with a navigation UI; both operate in the same real-time vehicle-guidance field, and the combination uses each element for its established function (prediction → route to a predicted-vacant space). Predictable result, no new mechanism.

Combination B — Smart-parking-meter / sensor-network art + the Combination-A system, plus a map GUI.
Teaches: "real-time parking space availability information" from smart meters with cameras/proximity sensors and transmitters; the near-expiry map (Fig. 5) with per-meter countdown indicators and a current-position marker.
Motivation: Displaying geographically-located sensor status on a map with the user's position is the predictable use of a geo-coded sensor network; the patent's claimed indicators (Fig. 5: "expire in two minutes/ten minutes") are straightforward renderings of meter data. No unexpected result.

Combination C — Personalization: parking/navigation art + user-profile art.
Teaches: the dependent limitations of user preferences (vehicle size, parking style, cost, proximity).
Motivation: Recommender/profile personalization was a routine design choice; tailoring a suggestion to the user's vehicle and budget is an obvious, well-motivated refinement, and the specification offers no non-obvious technical mechanism — only conventional stored-preference logic.

Combination D — Multi-modal trip assistants (flight-status + crowd-sourced line-wait data) + routing.
Teaches: the airport example (Terminal A, "security line quickest at Concourse C," "Flight 1222 is Late," predicting security wait times from mobile-device signals).
Motivation: Aggregating flight-status feeds and crowd-sourced location pings into one travel dashboard is the predictable aggregation of independently known data sources; the patent claims the aggregation generically, with no asserted algorithmic novelty. This is the weakest-supported combination because I could not verify a pre-2014 reference teaching security-line wait prediction from device signals.

Combination E — Dynamic updating and decision-point timing.
Teaches: the mid-trip update (suggested space becomes occupied → new space) and delivery "at a suitable time prior to the user reaching the juncture."
Motivation: Real-time feeds inherently change; re-computing and re-notifying on change would be obvious to try (a routine matter of design choice under KSR), and timing a notification just before a route branch is the natural use of a navigation system's known ETA/geometry data.

5. Where the patent has plausible non-obviousness arguments (be candid)

• Claims (if drafted with specificity) tying parking-availability state directly to security-line/flight data in one decision-point-timed notification may resist a simple two-reference combination; the examiner would need art disclosing cross-domain aggregation timed to a specific route juncture.
• The "email/calendar trip detection" element and the "signal-count" security-wait estimate (FIG. 4(a)) are narrow; unless prior art discloses these specific triggers, an obviousness case on those dependent claims is weaker.
• Nexus: any secondary-considerations argument (commercial success, licensing, copying) must be tied by nexus to the claimed inventive concept, not to the commercial navigation product generally.

6. Bottom line

On the record I could retrieve, the independent claims of US 9,921,078 — detect a trip, aggregate disparate source data including real-time parking availability, generate navigational/parking assistance content, and deliver it to a computing device — sit squarely in a predictable-combination posture under KSR. The most defensible § 103 challenge would pair US 8,994,560-type availability-prediction art (subject to date verification) with a conventional turn-by-turn navigation system, add smart-meter sensor art for the "real-time" limitation and map-display art for the near-expiry GUI, and add profile-based personalization art for the dependent claims; motivation is supplied by the admitted problem of finding parking efficiently and by the shared field and established functions of each element.

Caveats I will not paper over: (1) the actual examiner-cited references for this patent were not obtainable from the provided page or my searches, so this is not a verified invalidity position; (2) several references above are post-priority and usable only as background; (3) the claims themselves were truncated in the provided text, so element-by-element mapping is reconstruction from the abstract/specification rather than from claim language. If you can supply the patent's "(56) References Cited" list or the issued claims, I can convert this framework into a genuine claim-chart.