DEBS2012 on Event Patterns

August 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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At DEBS last month, a few members of the EPTS Reference Architecture team tutored on the latest Functional Event Patterns list – with sample and pseudocode implementations – covering all aspects of event preparation, analysis, (complex event) detection, and reaction. From a TIBCO CEP perspective, this version mostly covers TIBCO BusinessEvents rule patterns (i.e. how these functional patterns map to a standard event-based production rule pseudocode), with a few references to BE State Models and the odd BE Continuous Query [*1]. These can be viewed alongside examples from Oracle EP, IBM WODM, IBM Stream Insight and the PROLOG-based Prova.

This remains very much a work-in-progress [*2], but should give a good idea of where we are heading. In the “real world,” it should be noted that often many of these functions are combined into a single operation (eg: covering preparation/filtering, analysis/transformation, detection/composition and reaction/assessment in a single rule or query). [Read more...]

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DEBS11: did we just glimpse BPMN3 ?

July 25, 2011 by Leave a Comment
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AFFOne of the surprising (and for me, interesting) sessions at DEBS 2011 was the edBPM section – where event processing collides with business process management (or business processes, anyway). While much of the BPM world concentrates on workflow-oriented BPM (supported with automated services), there are several interesting areas (or extensions) such as “dynamic BPM” (any type of business process not explicitly pre-defined as an orchestrated process) or “case management” (handling cases with processes as well as plans and rules), through to “adaptive case management” (some superset of the two).

At DEBS, IBM’s Rick Hull presented on “Business Entities with Guard-Stage-Milestone Lifecycles: Managing Entity Interactions with Conditions and Events” (a good attempt at summarising the contents of the paper within the title!). This was directly related to the OMG Case Management standard submission mentioned last month… and amazingly well-aligned with TIBCO’s current deployments of the Advanced Fulfillment Framework (using CEP, BPM and decision management). The only main difference was that IBM had reworked the concept of state models (which is where guard-stage-milestone lifecycles – GSMLs? – come into play) to allow for things like more dynamic state transitions; in reality state models can be extended to handle such requirements but nonetheless UML could well benefit from some attention here.

On reflection, the IBM models presented at DEBS would make ideal extensions to BPMN. Most vendors are no doubt still digesting BPMN2; but do not be surprised if something like TIBCO AFF or IBM GSMLs get absorbed into a future BPMN (notation) standard!

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DEBS11 Tutorial on Event Processing Design Patterns

July 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment
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debs11tutorialTIBCO, Oracle, IBM and F.U.Berlin presented the latest tutorial from the EPTS Reference Architecture Group today at the ACM Distributed Event Based Systems Conference being held at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Labs. This covered the current work of the EPTS Reference Architecture group on defining (and refining) common event processing design patterns like “filter”, “enrich” and “route”.

This tutorial proved interesting to prepare: we discussed patterns in terms of the different event processing technologies of the presenters: rules-oriented event processing (TIBCO BusinessEvents, IBM Websphere Decision Server Business Events component, and Prova) and stream-oriented event processing (Oracle CEP, and IBM Infosphere Streams). In future patterns work we’ll try and expand this list (as well as the patterns covered), for example to include the TIBCO BusinessEvents Query Language, Pattern Framework, and State Model, and maybe TIBCO Hawk rules.Watch this space!

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Academic activity in CEP…

June 30, 2011 by Leave a Comment
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DEBS 2011 is an ACM conference too

… seems to be increasing if the rate of academic conferences related to this area is an indication. In Europe we have seen 3 recent announcements for the next 12 months:

If any academic-types are considering visiting Italy for the first event above, they could also listen to Google talking about using CP to solve allocation problems etc at the 17th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, Perugia, Italy from 12-16th September 2011…

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DEBS11 Main Program Published

May 23, 2011 by 2 Comments
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debs2011The ACM Distributed Event Based Systems conference now has had the rest of its program published. This event is “in cooperation with” the EPTS (and indeed share the same Chair – Opher Etzion of IBM Research). I helped in organising the Industry Track along with Richard Tibbets of Streambase, Alex Alves of Oracle, Mark Horsburgh of Progress, Alex Kozlenkov of Betfair, and Mark Proctor and Edson Tirelli of Drools: we had an interestingly diverse selection of papers which hopefully will be of interest to attendees…

If you want a quick look, here are the paper titles from the event (with my highlighting):

  • A General Extension System for Event Processing Languages
  • PRONTO – Support for real-time decision making
  • Capture Fields: Modularity in a Stream-Relational Event Processing Language
  • ARCADE – Abstraction and Realization of Complex Event Scenarios Using Dynamic Rule Creation
  • Complex Events and Actions to Control Cyber-Physical Systems
  • User-Oriented Rule Management for Event-Based Applications
  • Business Entities with Guard-Stage-Milestone Lifecycles: Managing Entity Interactions with Conditions and Events
  • Towards Context-Aware Adaptive Fault Tolerance in SOA Applications
  • Discovering Event Correlation Rules for Semi-Structured Business Processes
  • Rapid Detection of Rare Geospatial Events: Earthquake Warning Applications
  • Pattern Rewriting Framework for Event Processing Optimization
  • Program Analysis for Event-based Distributed Systems
  • Towards Proactive Event-Driven Computing
  • High-Performance Composite Event Monitoring System Supporting Large Numbers of Queries and Sources
  • Controlled English Language for Production and Event Processing Rules
  • Cost Analysis for Complex In-Network Event Processing in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks
  • Collaboration Pattern Assistant: An Event-driven Tool for Supporting Pattern-based Collaborations
  • SIP-based QoS Support Architecture and Session Management for DDS-based DRE Systems
  • Representing Events in a Clinical Environment: A Case Study
  • Efficient and Cost-aware Operator Placement in Heterogeneous Stream-Processing Environments
  • Distributed Event Processing For Activity Recognition
  • A Capacity Planning Framework for Event Brokers in Intelligent Transportation Cyber Physical Systems
  • Towards an adaptive Event Dissemination Middleware for MMVEs
  • fpga-ToPSS: Line-speed Event Processing on FPGAs
  • DejaVu: A Complex Event Processing System for Pattern Matching over Live and Historical Data Streams
  • Complex Event Pattern Evolution based on Real- Time Pattern Execution Statistics
  • Altibase DSM: CTable for Pull-based Processing in SPE
  • Efficient energy consumption in a smart office based on intelligent complex event processing
  • Towards an Inexact Semantic Complex Event Processing Framework
  • eQoSystem: Supporting Fluid Distributed Service- Oriented Workflows
  • A Scenario and Design Pattern based tool for Modeling and Evaluating Implementations of Event-based Reactive systems
  • Large-scale, situation-driven and quality-aware Event Marketplace: The Concept, Challenges and Opportunities
  • Disclosure control in multi-domain publish/subscribe systems
  • Towards Vulnerability- Based Intrusion Detection with Event Processing
  • High Performance Content-Based Matching Using GPUs
  • Take Five: The Management Infrastructure for Distributed Event- Driven Workflows
  • End-to-End Reliability for Best- Effort Content- Based Publish/ Subscribe Networks
  • Fine-grained Parallel XML Filtering for Content-based Publish/Subscribe Systems
  • Fault Injection- based Assessment of Partial Fault Tolerance in Stream Processing Applications
  • Efficiently Correlating Complex Events over Live and Archived Data Streams
  • Space-efficient Tracking of Persistent Items in a Massive Data Stream
  • SpamWatcher: A Streaming Social Network Analytic on the IBM Wire- speed Processor
  • Complex Pattern Ranking (CPR): Evaluating Top- k Pattern Queries Over Event Streams
  • Complex Event Pattern Detection over Streams with Interval-Based Temporal Semantics
  • An Intelligent Event-driven Approach for Efficient Energy Consumption in Commercial Buildings: Smart Office Use Case
  • A Complex Event Processing Architecture For Energy and Operation Management
  • A Paradigm Comparison for Collecting TV Channel Statistics from High-volume Channel Zap Events
  • Securely Disseminating RFID Events
  • Distributed Middleware Reliability and Fault Tolerance Support in System S
  • Scheduling for Real- Time Mobile MapReduce Systems
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DEBS11 Tutorial Program published

May 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment
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The ACM Distributed Event Based Systems conferencedebs2011 this year has just published its Tutorial Program, I see. DEBS2011 is being generously hosted by IBM at its famous T J Watson Research Labs in Yorktown Heights.

One of the tutorials is by the EPTS Reference Architecture team – comprising TIBCO, Oracle, IBM and Univ of Berlin – covering “Architectural and Functional Design Patterns for Event Processing”. This is really a preview of the cross-product design pattern work we are engaged in via EPTS forum, mapping common CEP functions to different Event Processing language styles and systems. Earlier DEBS tutorials on similar topics, and available on SlideShare, were on the Reference Architecture (2010) and Architecture and Patterns (2008).

For the Tutorial this year we will not be covering *all* design patterns, but a select few to give an indication of the differences / similarities in implementations, and development considerations involved. We are also planning to produce a book covering these patterns and examples later on.

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DEBS2011 Industrial Track – time to submit your abstract!

March 1, 2011 by Leave a Comment
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debs2011This year the ACM Distributed Event Based Systems conference (i.e. the CEP conference for researchers) is taking place at IBM Research, York Town Heights, New York in July this year. Highlights in past years included the Industrial Track and Tutorials: for example in 2009 Richard Tibbetts taught about CEP in Capital Markets, and in 2010 Prof Mike Franklin presented Truviso’s story on Continuous Analytics.

This year the Industrial Track has 2 options to make life easier for those of us busy in the world of commerce and/or not in the business of writing conference papers. These are:

  • Industry Track papers from industry researchers on commercially-based algorithms and developments (~10 pages)
  • Industry Experience papers from CEP implementors on interesting applications of CEP (~4 pages)

The Call For Papers mentions possible areas as event processing in…

  • ETL and System Integration across business systems,
  • real-time customer recommendations and notifications,
  • augmenting business processes, business process management, and case management,
  • use of functional, logical, and/or statistical methods,
  • software architectures based on or incorporating distributed event-centric computing and event processing networks,
  • SLA enforcement, governance, or regulatory compliance,
  • security and defense/defense-related intelligence, including sensor interpretation and command and control,
  • fault tolerance and disaster recovery approaches,
  • cloud-based architectures,
  • real-time analytics and information discovery, including new event pattern discovery,
  • monitoring and interpretation of event streams,
  • adaptations of existing commercial software solutions, systems and technologies to exploit event processing techniques,
  • business value demonstrations.

Should be interesting, and hopefully some of the CEP community will find time to submit their latest and greatest as papers at this event…

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DEBS2010: the EPTS Reference Architecture tutorial

July 13, 2010 by 4 Comments
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debs2010This year DEBS is in Europe, and in Kings College Cambridge, England – surely a model for the Harry Potter Hogwarts School of Architecture, with a quite amazing internal maze of staircases that entirely obviates any need for an on-site gym, while maybe requiring some kind of RFID-enabled roomkeys so event organisors can detect and rescue guests from obscure parts of the college.

Fellow Event Processing Technical Society colleagues Adrian Paschke (Freie Universitat Berlin) and Catherine Moxey (IBM CICS) and I presented a tutorial on the EPTS Event Processing Reference Architecture journey and development, with additional contributions from Alex Alves (Oracle) and Themis Palanos (University of Trento), on Monday this week. The presentation is now posted up on Slideshare (see below or here, or if in a Flash-free environment, check out the PDF).

One of the interesting audience questions was, if I recall correctly, why the EPTS Reference Architecture team did not differentiate their architecture more from that of, say, the BPM community? This was a little surprising as nowhere had we mentioned the words “business process” or “process orchestration”; neither had these really come up in the Reference Architecture discussions (other than as consumers of events). However, we did refer to the Fast Flower Delivery use case discussed in Opher Etzion and Peter Niblett’s forthcoming book on Event Processing, and Opher assured the audience that the event-driven processes therein were valid event processing requirements as opposed to BPM. An interesting point of reference here was the TIBCO user presentation at TUCON earlier this year that also found out the difference in BPM and CEP for their particular problem.

A related comment – from an end-user organisation – was that the sales teams of companies selling CEP solutions were often too quick to offer their BPM offerings rather than their CEP solutions. For an end-user to complain to vendors that “you are trying to sell me the wrong stuff” is pretty interesting! Wonder which vendors they were? :)

Debs2010 tutorial on epts reference architecture v1.1c
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Conferences for CEP and rules, 2010… (updated)

January 25, 2010 by 1 Comment
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Time to start the 2010 list of “interesting” CEP and rule-related conferences…so far I have 4 5 on the list, covering 2 3 weeks in May to July…  (yes I had forgotten Dagstuhl…). So, by date order:

  • Week starting 16 May, location Europe:
    • 2010 Dagstuhl Event Processing seminar, Dagstuhl in Germany, 16-21 May, theme = task-oriented, focused on a joint effort between the academic participants and the industrial participants (vendors, customers, analysts) … output will be a manifesto for the event processing discipline…
  • Week starting 21 June, location USA:
    • OMG Business Rules Symposium, co-located with the OMG Technical Meeting in Minneapolis, MN, day TBA, likely to cover the OMG rule standards such as SBVR (for documenting business rules) and PRR (for production rules)…
    • Semantic Technology Conference / RuleML co-organised Rules Track, San Francisco, June 21-25, theme = semantic rules [...are] more powerful, flexible, and active forms of “structured” knowledge…
  • Week starting 12 July, location UK:
    • ACM’s DEBS2010, Cambridge, July 12-15, theme = dissemination of original research, the discussion of practical insights, and the reporting on relevant experience relating to event-based computing… which was very interesting last year, and is “in cooperation with” the EPTS.
    • Rule2010 workshop, Edinburgh, July 14, theme = rule-based programming in Industry and the Semantic Web… which seems a bit wide to me (i.e. there is not much “semantic web” overlap with “industry”).
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DEBS’09: woe (or whoa) on the terminology of events, and other observations

July 13, 2009 by 3 Comments
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At DEBS last week, the EPTS Language and Use Case working groups presented tutorials, and the EPTS Reference Architecture group (co-chaired by TIBCO) met for a useful catch-up session. But sorely missed were the “Glossary-ers”, tasked with standardizing the terminology used in event processing applications and systems. The importance of this came to light when a discussion started up about whether “incidents” were events (which of course they are, although they may not be detectable at the time they occur). Opher Etzion (from IBM Research) covered some more of this in his discussion on the Use Case tutorial.

Interestingly, there is a whole ITIL section on the process of Incident Management, which seems yet another application area for Complex Event Processing (at least for the detection part: other aspects may also include decision management and process management).

Other observations from DEBS were that:

  • Compared to previous years, there was much more focus on event processing rather than the (possibly simpler, probably more established) aspects of pub-sub middleware.
  • ACM accreditation seems to have done the conference no harm, and indeed seems to have made the organisers’ lives easier.
  • There was little in the way of progress to standards, with no or little mention of PRR or RIF; at least the Siemens CEP team were progressing on an interesting project using BMM, and were interested in the proposed EMP. The latter is awaiting more interest, including that likely to result from a supposedly planned link-up between the EPTS and OMG…
  • Was it just me, or did there seem to be a dominance of attendees (and presenters) from Germany? Is the land of “Vorsprung durch Technik” stealing a lead in IT by recognizing the advantages of event processing over conventional data processing?

Next year DEBS’10 moves back to Europe to the tranquil quads (and incorrect punting technique) of Cambridge University. Attendees can probably look forward to cries of  “Ich habe sich in den Fluss!” or somesuch…

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