James Owen’s “technical-biased” October Rules Fest returned to Dallas this year, and given it had a fair amount of coverage on Complex Event Processing, TIBCO contributed a paper titled “What’s Different about Rules in CEP“. ORF was held a few blocks East of  a somewhat infamous Dallas location recognizable to many from a certain event 46 years ago.

I was very impressed by the content of ORF, although a minor quibble is that James persists in holding it as a separate event from BRForum and RuleML (both taking place the following week “up the road” in Vegas). James claims this is to avoid any marketing bias at a technical conference - fair enough, except that it’s the marketeers who pay the sponsorships that allow shows to take place.

From the Complex Event Processing perspective, coverage included:

• “Early Alert System at SouthWest Airlines” by Mark Sturdivant and Greg Barton - as it happens, a TIBCO BusinessEvents application - helping manage 540 aircraft over 68 airports. Interesting point here was the move from an event-centric design to a state + event centric design, and the classification of 2 main types of rule:
  1. rules maintaining the state of knowledge (concept structures) based on incoming events - a kind of “situation maintenance“.
  2. rules creating “alerts” responding to possible future states that are worthy of notification - or potential “incidents” - in other words “sense and respond“.
• “Temporal Reasoning - a requirement for CEP” by Edson Tirelli and Adam Mollenkopf, exploring the Drools’ rule engine’s new time expressions in their rule syntax and a CEP use case at Fedex (who incidentally are a very large TIBCO EMS customer).
• “A Survey on Complex Event Processing Models” - a very comprehensive  coverage of the CEP language space by Charles Young, especially on possible interactions between stream-processing SQL engines and different parts of the Rete algorithm.

But CEP and attendent issues came up throughout the conference. Some interesting points were:

• Andrew Waterman presented on ecological solutions via educating farmers inadvertantly involved in agricultural over-exploitation and desertification in Central America, through the use of rule-based games. A new and likely increasingly populer term raised was for authentication of social network systems - Facebook authentication!
• David Holz from Grindwork presented on the use of declarative rules as a new generation software development methodology, describing how rules convert state to behavior. And “knowledge of state” is of course essential in CEP and a differentiator over stateless rule engines.
• Thomas Cooper of DEC XCON / XSEL 1980s expert system fame explicitly called out temporal / CEP models as being missing from most rule languages today. Interestingly, one of the extensions he’d added to the 70’s rule language OPS5 was to allow for effective dates on facts… probably the equivalent in the CEP world today is BusinessEvents’ concept history capability (storing the historic record of past values and their timespans). Thomas also lamented about rule system performance in multi-CPU systems (again, somewhat ameliorated by TIBCO BusinessEvents’ multi-threaded Rete and distributed agents capabilities).
• Dr Jacob Feldman presented on the merger of constraint solvers and inference rules - certainly an area to watch (and we are certainly very interested in this area of Business Optimization). A new JSR (JSR-331) has been set up by Jacob to standardize APIs for constraint solver execution, although surprisingly the CP vendor community is being somewhat slow to organize around this.
• Daniel Brookshier from UML vendor NoMagic presented on PRR as well as sponsored the event. Kudos to Daniel for implementing PRR *and* using Ruleby to provide a simple testing mechanism for UML users of PRR. This means there will be plenty to discuss at the next PRR standards meeting …
• FICO’s Carlos Serrano-Morales and Carole Ann Berlioz-Matignon  (apart from winning the award for the longest names on the agenda) presented on the importance of measuring KPIs for rule “performance” (aka stateful monitoring of rule execution, another characteristic of BAM-type CEP systems) and business rules in the cloud and the importance of asynchronous events - another CEP characteristic. However, the FICO folk did not go as far as announcing any CEP offering.
• Luke Voss presented on a system of rulebased agents. Distributed agents are of course also a capability of TIBCO’s CEP system, although TIBCO’s agents do not comply with Luke’s requirement of “mobility”. Others may argue they do, though…
• Rete-inventor Charles Forgy presented the closing talk on parallel rulebases - something that probably benefits CEP more than simple decision services. Looked a bit like Map Reduce for rules to me! Charles also complained how far behind the Java JVM developers were in their failure to fully exploit multi-threading in Java.

For a somewhat less biased view of ORF’s sessions, check out Charles Young’s blog for days 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Rules - both business rules definitions (including business decisions) and rule-based programming - are very relevant to event processing (both for complex event detection and the subsequence decision and reaction - all parts of the “processing” aspect).  Over the coming weeks there are some interesting conference events coming up:

EPTS5, 21-23 Sept 09: the Event Processing Technical Society is covering its working group activities in Trento Italy.

• Audience: analysts, vendors, corporate architects interested in the state of play in event processing technologies.
• Interesting for CEP: lots of European research is going on in CEP, and quite a lot of commercial take-up too. Some of the US leaders in EPTS won’t be crossing the Big Pond for this meeting though. Is this a sign that Europe is at parity with the US on advanced IT?
• Website: http://events.unitn.it/en/eps09

BRForum, 1-5 Nov 09: the main Business Rules conference (interpreted as either “business rules” conference or “business” rules conference - both views are valid!). Co-located (hoorah!) with
RuleML09, 5-7 Nov 09: rule markups and related issues, covering SBVR, PRR, RIF and (possibly) RuleML itself.

• Audience: BRForum is for IT and business folks interested in the rules area (including rule documentation as well as decision automation). Although the content mostly aims outside the power of events / EDA / CEP world.
  The RuleML audience is more for the technical folks (systems integrators, enterprise architects, standards folks, academics) looking at rule representations.
• Interest for CEP: At BRForum David Luckham is giving a (wakeup) session. TIBCO is also presenting on how CEP helps Decisions. RuleML probably has a CEP session including a CEP keynote on Rules in CEP. Also interesting is the start of coverage of other rule types - in particular constraint rules - which have yet to be much exploited in CEP (or conventional decision services).
• Website: http://www.businessrulesforum.com/ (and TIBCO blog readers can apply a discount code “9SPPV”)
  and http://www.defeasible.org/ruleml2009/

ORF09, 26-30 Oct 09: the October Rules Fest is an “alternative” to BRForum for “rules programmers”.

• Audience: those interested in rule programming constructs, techniques, issues, etc.
• Interest for CEP: Even more CEP focus here; one emailed comment was that “CEP is the linch-pin for all rulebased systems for the future”. Plus a TIBCO contribution on whats different about rules in CEP…
• Website: http://www.octoberrulesfest.org/

Traditionally (i.e. for the past 2-3 years!) CEP has mainly been covered by the (mostly academic) DEBS event [3rd is this year in Nashville, July 6-9] and the EPTS Symposium [5th is this year in Trento Italy, Sept 21-23]. Interestingly there is increasing spin-off of CEP into other events - such as (interesting for rule-driven CEP tools like TIBCO BusinessEvents) the Business Rules Forum [12th this year in Vegas - presumably as an antidote to this year's economic news - Nov 1-5]. BRForum has acknowledged 2 very-CEP-related agenda entries by 2 very-respected-experts:

Event Processing 2010: Past, Present and Future
David Luckham, Emeritus Professor, Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

This tutorial on Complex Event Processing (CEP) will cover six topics.
1. Developing markets for event processing - a short survey of the growth of CEP in enterprise management applications and Business Activity Monitoring.
2. History. - Event processing 1950 ─ 2000.
3. Adopting event processing — how to analyze your event processing requirements and plan a solution.
4. A survey of basic CEP concepts and their applications.
5. Crossing the Chasms - the four stages in the development of event processing from 2000 to 2050. The need to improve the CEP technology in commercial tools and applications.
6. The age of ubiquitous CEP - event processing goes global and disappears under the hood. Scenarios of current and future applications.
What you will learn:
• What Complex Event Processing is
• How to apply CEP to solve business problems and improve your BI operations
• How CEP enhances Service Oriented Architectures, Business Process Management, and Business Rules systems

A Facilitated Peer-to-Peer Workshop: Semantic Processes, Services and Events
Paul Haley, Founder, Automata, Inc.

Semantic technology provides the most general and flexible form of data modeling along with logical and rule-based capabilities. A new wave of semantic tools and standards, including models of time, events, and processes promise to align enterprise data modeling, application development, service-oriented architecture and business process management more closely with the perspectives of knowledge management and business rules practitioners.
What we will discuss:
• How semantic standards extend model-driven architecture to knowledge management
• How semantic architectures and models unify SOA and BPM, including events
• How semantics increases the impact of business intelligence and activity monitoring
• How BPMN, SBVR, PRR and complex event processing do or don’t intersect

Just the week before BRForum there is the rule-developer-focused October Rule Fest (which I keep wanting to write as Oktober Rule Fest, for some reason) [in Dallas, Oct 26-30] which, apart from a fascinating agenda for rule IT folk, has CEP topics such as:

Early Alert System at Southwest Airlines
Greg Barton: Southwest Airlines, Senior Software Engineer

Southwest Airlines is venturing into the rules development space with the Early Alert System. EAS enables SWA to have a real-time model of it’s entire aircraft fleet, tracking such activities as taxi in, taxi out, and in gate turn. It does this by maintaining a data structure representing physical assets and the activities they perform. Incoming data from those assets update the data structure, and rules react to the changes. We hope to use this paradigm going forward to use rules to monitor other aspects of the enterprise, enabling a more agile and efficient response to the airline’s daily operating challenges. Our main points will be the Overview, Feature Review, Design, Other Uses of Rules at present by SWA and the future of rules at SWA. [Note: this is a TIBCO CEP application in production at SWA]

ET2: Temporal Reasoning: a requirement for CEP
Edson Tirelli: Drools, CEP Designer

As Complex Event Processing grows in popularity and applicability, the convergence between modeling paradigms demand more and more functional requirements from the available tools. One key requirement for CEP use cases (and standard business scenarios) is the ability to write rules and queries that require some degree of temporal awareness, from simple constraints to actual data inference. More than that, temporal reasoning is a feature on top of which the actual platform can leverage internal optimizations, aiming for resource savings and improved scalability. [Note: DROOLS has now become the 2nd CEP inference engine]

A Survey of Complex-Event Processing Models
Charles Young: Solid Soft, Principal Consultant

Prof. David Luckham defined an EPN (Event Processing Network) as a network of ‘lightweight rules engines’ which act as Event Processing Agents (EPAs). He contrasted this with the exploitation of rules-based inference engines as ‘heavyweight EPAs’. Complex-event processing (CEP) is inherently rule-based and centres on pattern matching based, in large part, on temporal constraints. CEP, today, is broadly characterised by the use of diverse processing models embodied within different technologies. What are these models? What are their major differentiators, strengths and weaknesses, and how do they compare with Rete engines and other rules processing approaches? Are some models truly more ‘lightweight’ or ‘heavyweight’? What are the underlying differences and similarities and how might each approach best be exploited in building scalable and agile EPNs?

Still to be announced is the RuleML09 event’s agenda [conveniently co-located with BRForum, Nov 5-7] and targeting the rule representation community… we’ll have to wait and see if CEP gets represented here too!

Disclaimer: TIBCO is presenting at BRF and ORF on rule-CEP topics, too.