Abstract
Along with the introduction of OBD I in 1988 and OBD II in 1996 by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), car manufactures and component suppliers worldwide were challenged to concentrate their research and development activities on the market introduction of reliable control systems having the ability to diagnose or even to prevent a failure in any component of an internal combustion engine, particularly in the engine's emission control systems, and this throughout the lifetime of a vehicle.
One way to measure and to quantify the innovations emerging from research and development activities related to engine diagnostics is through the number of patent applications that are submitted to different patent offices in the world.
This paper provides a statistical analysis of the innovation trends in Europe, the United States of America, Japan, China and Korea in the field of engine diagnostics that took place during the last 10 years, as seen by the European Patent Office. It demonstrates inter alia in which technical fields most development takes place related to (on-board) diagnostics and who are the most important patent applicants in the world of intellectual property related to this technical domain. Further information is provided on which country or region attracts the highest number of patent applications per technical field and from which countries these developments mostly do origin.
The technical fields discussed are chosen according to the International Patent Classification (IPC) scheme, which is refined in more detail in the European Patent Classification scheme (ECLA) and the Japanese Patent Classification schemes (FICLA, FTCLA). All data are extracted from the patents' bibliographic data as published about 18 months after the first filing of the patent application and collected in the databases maintained by the European Patent Office.
Keywords: Engine diagnostics, patents, applicants, statistics, innovation trends