State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Assigned Patent for Developing Policy Administration Systems

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Jan. 18 -- State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance, Bloomington, Illinois, has been assigned a patent (No. 10,535,102, initially filed May 14, 2015) developed by three co-inventors for "systems and methods for developing policy administration systems based upon finite state machine models." The co-inventors are Joseph W. Norton, Normal, Illinois, Venkata R. Kongara, Bloomington, Illinois, and Timothy J. Wheeler, Normal, Illinois.

The full-text of the patent can be found at http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=10,535,102.PN.&OS=PN/10,535,102&RS=PN/10,535,102

The abstract states: "A new design strategy based upon finite state machine models is used to develop a policy administration system. The policy administration system comprises a plurality of finite state machined-based households, each of which is defined by a set of states represented by data that describe or relate to various policies associated with each household, a set of events represented by transactions that operate on the data, and/or a set of transition functions represented by transaction logics and/or product rules that govern how the transactions are processed. In this manner, each finite state machine-based household becomes a type of self-contained policy administration system that may be executed and managed concurrently. Each policy may be an insurance policy, such as an auto, home, life, renters, personal articles, or health insurance policy. Each finite state machine-based or virtual household may facilitate managing, updating, or generating insurance policies for the household and/or household members."

Written by Ranjan Behera; edited by Sudarshan Harpal.