A heuristic procedure to identify most valuable chain of patents in a given technology

We argue that patents under litigation have maximum value. We develop a heuristic procedure to determine how patents (associated with a given technology) under litigation form a network of patent family members and priority patents involved. Later we develop a simple algorithm to identify ldquocriticalrdquo and ldquosignificantrdquo chain in the above network. We argue that these ldquocriticalrdquo and ldquosignificantrdquo chains (in the above network so created) offer companies valuable information in deciding their patent portfolio strategies.