… became the topic on one of the last days of OMG this week, with an interesting debate on the relationships between case management and dynamic business processes / activities, records management, and the BPMN roadmap. So what’s on the cards, and what is the relationship to event processing?

Firstly, this discussion led on from the dynamic business activity modeling RFI discussed at the last OMG meeting: TIBCO solutions here include TIBCO BusinessEvents’ CEP solution (combining events, states and rules) and TIBCO iProcess Conductor (combining BPM with CEP and rules).

As is usual, another group in OMG (named, not surprisingly, the “Government Domain Task Force” or GovDTF) had already done some work on the “case” side of the problem, with a Record Management Services model. This covers areas like the documentation for government employees, with associated rules on when information needs to be deleted or replaced. Another example are your DMV driving license records, including your historic license photo records, etc. Some of these personnel “cases” can be active for over 100 years! One solution mentioned by the GovDTF for modeling the processing of such cases could simply combine events, rules and state…

The relationship between these cases and processes is that multiple processes can be applied against cases (for example: loan initial application to loan payment completion). In addition, these (changing) cases can have multiple (changing) events invoke (changing) rules which direct what (changing) processes are used. The general opinion is that case management can be too complex / ad hoc / rule-driven / human-oriented for simple process orchestrations handled by BPMN. So one obvious question was whether case management should be a separate standard or should simply be a BPMN roadmap item (where the latter includes other non-flow-based process types, but not yet continuous event processing).

So: should case management be Record Management ++, BPMN 4.0, or its own standard referencing the prior 2? Or just another potential use case for event+state+rule tools? Next Case Management RFP discussion: March OMG meeting, Washington DC.

Eli Perlman of Cognizant gave a great presentation at the BPM Consortium (OMG) this week on how BPM cannot by itself solve all the health industry’s problems - it also needs to handle events and complex events to intelligently drive these processes.

To give an indication of some of the regulatory compliance problems in the industry, Eli showed what happened when he ordered some (regulated) pills from an offshore (supposedly Canadian) pharmacy: he received unmarked packets of pills from India and Greece which bore little relation to what he had ordered. Also, US Customs had ignored the lack of customs documentation and the “Drugs” stamp on the packets. One wonders if the Columbian cartels use the USPS too?

Coincidentally (to BPM+CEP, not the importing of drugs!), TIBCO made a “BPM+” announcement earlier in the week which referenced the increasing trend of combining BPM with event processing.

Jacob Feldman from 4C presented to OMG this week on the need for standardization in the Constraint Programming (CP) community. Although you can (and often do) represent business contraints in business rules and CEP systems (for example, you can argue that any rule condition is a constraint, or a value range in a decision table is a constraint), CP usually uses special techniques to solve complex business optimization problems that require juggling / relaxing these constraints to find an optimal or near-optimal “solution”. Examples might be aircraft load planning, bus schedules, and delivery vehicle routing. CP solutions to these problems also intersect with the CEP space, as plans are disrupted by events (such as an aircraft flight diversion due to turbulence, an event requiring more bus capacity, and a delivery vehicle breakdown). Sometimes such constraint systems are implemented using production rules, too.

With respect to rule model standards, OMG PRR has defined a baseline “rule behavior” definition, and OMG UML already has object constraints in OCL. It will be interesting to see if standardizing the metamodel for CP problems and engines will exploit or work with these, and how future CP systems will be used with CEP systems.

At OMG this week we had an update on the BPMN 2.0 work. BPMN 2.0 is of course primarily for the “human event processing” community, a.k.a BPM, and adds an XML storage mechanism for persisting processes and diagrams as an “alternative” to WfMC’s XPDL. BPMN defines easy-to-read process “orchestrations” or flows - but of course it isn’t for declarative process definitions (for example as lists of rules) nor continuous event processing (as implied for CEP). But it is very widely used.

One new construct in BPMN 2.0 is the (proposed) BPMN Conversation - an aggregation of communications between processes. This is designed to provide a more summary view for users: BPMN conversations describe the “pathways” between processes, as opposed to the individual messages [*1]. One example showed them as process-to-process, process-to-multiple-instances-of-process, and multi-way conversations. Obviously these conversations map to underlying middleware concepts (if the processes are distributed), and also to complex event processing event sources, sinks and agents. Currently the EPTS Glossary defines the term “Event Channels” to describe some aspect of this connection (in TIBCO BusinessEvents, this is the technical messaging system used).

Currently EPTS is starting up the Working Groups to handle things like glossary updates: one suggestion for the EPTS Glossary Working Group might be to extend the Event Channel definition to allow for something like an Event Pathway that represents the same thing as a BPMN 2.0 Conversation. Currently, Event Channel, Pathway and Topic in EPTS are all described as being equivalent. In TIBCO BusinessEvents we model just Channels (message technology) and Destinations (message addresses or topics) - conversations are effectively inferred rather than fixed in a model, but might be an interesting output for a message monitoring tool.

Notes:

Disclosure: TIBCO’s BPM team is involved in the definition of BPMN 2.0.

[1] Analogy: consider the sheep track (indicating the conversation) on the hillside between pasture1 and pasture2 (processes), rather than specific sheep travelling back and forth (message instances representing instances of process transitions).

TIBCO BusinessEvents 3.0.1 is now shipping. This includes a few niceties for complex event processing needs such as extreme performance and better business control:

• More platform support:
  • x86 platforms can now use Solaris 10 64′, Windows Server 2008 32′ and 64′, Vista 32′
  • HP-PA-RISC servers can now use HP-UX-11i
  • Java 6 JVMs
• Some Decision Manager and Rule Management Server extensions, for example allowing multiple decision tables to be associated with a “decision service” (a.k.a. virtual rule function) and selected at run-time (for example, under rule-control). Also some interesting optimizations which ensure even very large decision tables, such as those output from analytics models, are executed very efficiently
• More Preprocessor options around thread and queue control
• Some updated docs and examples.