ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,249,199, issued on March 11, was assigned to AlertEnterprise Inc. (Fremont, Calif.).

"Method and apparatus for policy based access control" was invented by Yogesh Ailawadi (Fremont, Calif.) and Vikas Chauhan (Mountain House, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An authorization approach to physical access uses identity attributes, doors/readers attributes, time of the day, and policies to determine access rights to facilities and physical spaces in real-time, based on three criteria: who, when, and what. Embodiments address the constantly changing physical access needs of companies as those needs evolve."

The patent was filed on Oct. ...