One 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!

TIBCO, 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!

… 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:

• 1st International Workshop on Algorithms and Models for Distributed Event Processing (nattily abbreviated to AlMoDEP), September 19, 2011 - Rome, Italy
• ACM Symposium on Applied Computing Data Streams Track in conjunction with the 27th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing in Trento University, Italy, March 20-23, 2012
• 6th ACM International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems (usually known as DEBS), July 16-20, 2012 Freie Universitaet Berlin, Berlin, Germany. [DEBS2011 gets underway in a week's time]

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…

The 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

The ACM Distributed Event Based Systems conference 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.