Event handling boosted in BPMN 2.0
Posted by Paul Vincent
Bruce Silver has blogged on BPMN 2.0’s current status, and of interest to the CEP community are the new event handling features:
- “Non-interrupting events”: events can occur that are handled in a process without derailing it. Of course this is standard behavior in a CEP tool: events can be processed independently and later combined with other event processing…
- “Escalation events”: events generated internally by the process. Again, standard fare in CEP tools. Bruce on comments the power of this for ad hoc and semi-structured behaviors, and indeed some CEP use cases are for just monitoring BPM / SOA systems, intepreting all types of generated events…
- “Event subprocesses”: event handlers for events. Again, standard fare for CEP to do some processing to any event, in parallel with other event processing.
From these it seems that BPM is taking a step towards more sophisticated event handling, or at least a step up from “basic” event handling. Of course, complex event processing additionally involves continuous event processing, whereas BPM usually involves human interactions and workflow control / management, so there continues to be differentiators.
Bruce makes an interesting comment on business rules too: that “routing logic in process gateways” are not “business rules”. That doesn’t really make sense: for sure some gateways will be process-housekeeping decisions of little interest to the business user, but others will surely embed business-critical decisions. On the other hand, it has long been acknowledged that a best practice for BPM is to delegate such business decisions to a managed decision service - hence the explicit new business rule (aka decision) task in BPMN 2.0. And,in the CEP world, for tools like TIBCO BusinessEvents to invoke a decision managed by its Decision Manager tool.
BPM, Complex Event Processing (CEP), Rules | 20 March 2009 |
