Pre-Grant Publication Number: 20070162496
Filing Date: March 18, 2004Priority Date: September 15, 2005
Inventors: Roland Pulfer
Assignee:
Current U.S. Classification: 707, 707/104100
Facilitator's Comment 
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Strategy suggestion 1: I think we should look for art with a publication date well before March 19, 2003. I do not know why the priority date of September 15, 2005 is listed here. However, the version of this application on the USPTO website cites a foreign (Swiss) application with the March 19, 2003 priority. See also http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?wo=2004083983 for the international filing. If we can, let's find art with clear priority over this earlier date.
Strategy suggestion 2: There are many formalisms that have been developed over the years for modeling complex systems. The Transaction Level Modeling framework for electronics design automation as suggested by Lou looks like a good example. Others include Petri nets, finite state machines, UML statecharts, abstract state machines and so on. I think a good search strategy to address Claim 1 would then be to search for articles, patents and book chapters that refer to any such formalism with a keyword matching "compar*" or "diff*" in the title or abstract. Google scholar and ACM digital library would be good to use. Any references found should suffice to address Claim 1 provided that the comparison involves a predefined library of component types (objects) and their attributes.
Strategy suggestion 3: I suspect there will be many art items that address claim 1, so we should move on to select those items that are include the elements of additional claims. Most importantly, I think that we should focus on prior art that involves hierarchical models with comparison carried out at different levels of abstraction as identified in Claim 5.