We propose to exploit the technology for complex event processing (CEP) embodied in the rule-based engine known as IBM Active Middleware Technology™ and extend it to the development of real-time CEP applications. Specifically, we propose to develop a framework that includes an integrated development environment (IDE) for defining rules, and, given a set of rules, generates code for a CEP application and enables us to determine time bounds on the response of this application to a set of supported events. In particular, the IDE helps determine a time bound for the execution time of the code corresponding to each rule. The calculation of time bounds is based on a set of benchmark measurements to be performed on the target hardware and involves code segments corresponding to basic operations. Although we assume the code generation phase produces Java™ code, the same approach can be applied to any other suitable programming language. In support of a feasibility argument for the proposed approach, we present some preliminary experimental results obtained on a partially implemented tool.

We propose to develop a framework which provides the ability to apply complex event processing in realtime domains, thus allowing an easier process of developing and maintaining specific solutions for real-time event-based systems, while upholding the real time requirements of the system. Specifically, we propose to develop a framework that includes an integrated development environment for defining rules, and, given a set of rules, generates code for a complex event processing application for which it is able to determine time bounds on the response of this application to a set of supported events. In particular, the tool helps determine a time bound for the execution time of the code corresponding to each rule. Many Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications, in domains such as financial services, manufacturing, gaming and military/aerospace, have real-time performance requirements. We present real-life industry use cases from these domains as motivation for the potential benefit in developing real-time complex event processing applications. In support of a feasibility argument for the proposed approach we present some preliminary experimental results obtained on a partially implemented tool.

Complex event processing (CEP) is an emerging technology for extracting information from distributed message-based systems. CEP is software used to create and deploy applications that process large volumes of incoming messages or events, analyze those messages or events in various ways, and respond to conditions of interest in real-time. This technology allows users of a system to specify the information that is of interest to them. This paper presents an over-view of complex event processing applied to the domain of financial services demonstrated using a CEP product called AMiT (active middleware technology). Two case studies (in the banking and the insurance industries) are introduced in order to demonstrate the special use of the CEP concept in the financial services domain and the advantages both on built-time and run-time. The various usages of CEP for BAM, messaging, decision-making in financial services applications express the increasing role of CEP in intelligent event-driven financial services solutions

Active database systems are systems that detect events and trigger actions as a result of this detection. Active capabilities are provided by a set of rules, such that each rule consists of three components (event, condition, and action). A major performance issue in active databases is the issue of relationships among rule components. Current implementations of triggers do not allow flexibility in the selection of transaction policies (partition of rules to transactions); the intertransaction timing policies of rules' components, the intratransaction policies of commit and abort dependencies, and synchronization issues. While these decisions have a substantial impact on the application performance, they are not provided as design primitives; one of the reasons for that is that it is very difficult to manually tune these decisions. In some research prototypes of active databases, these relationships are encapsulated into a set of coupling modes. Each coupling mode represents a combination of decisions about the partition of rule components to transactions, the relative timing within a transaction, and the interrelationships among these transactions. We describe a self-tuning model that operates on a general active database. The optimization model strives to minimize a programmable goal function that reflects the system designer's preferences and the system behavior and the applications' semantics through constraint definitions. The tuning model strives to optimize the mutual relationships among the system rules' components.

In this paper we explore and develop an exploratory application in the area of active services in wireless environment. This proof of concept will utilize Amit (Active Middleware Technology) extended with location-based context that can be supplied a general location Service. The system is aimed at the following goals:Support wireless sources of events and data.Support wireless subscribers to alerts and actions.Support real-time decisions based on tracing and correlating multi events from various sources.Support real-time spatio-temporal situations / conclusions / alerts.This paper combines the area of active rules that support event composition with the area of location services, and the result is a service that employs intelligent publish/subscribe mechanism such that both publishers and subscribers can be mobile devices.

This paper presents the context awareness capabilities of Amit. Amit is a tool that includes both a language and an efficient run-time execution mechanism, aimed at reducing the complexity of active applications. It follows the observation that in many cases, there is a gap between current tools that enable to react to a single event (following the ECA: Event - Condition - Action paradigm), and the reality, in which reaction is relevant only in certain contexts in response to patterns over event histories. Context awareness in Amit takes into account event information, time and location to introduce the concept of situation. The concept of situation is an extension of the concept of composite event in its context awareness capability; it results in additional expressive power, flexibility and usability.

Reactive applications are applications that include a substantial processing that is triggered by events. This paper describes an application development tool that resolves a major problem in this area: the gap that exists between events that are reported by various channels, and the reactive situations that are the cases to which the system should react. These situations are composition of events or other situations (e.g. “when at least four events of the same type occurred”) or content filtering on events (e.g. “only events that relates to IBM stocks”) or both (“when at least four purchases of more than 50,000 shares have been performed on IBM stocks in a single week”). The paper describes the generic application development tool that is being developed within Amit (active middleware technologies) project in HRL, describes its language and features and demonstrate some of its capabilities using examples.

Events are at the core of reactive and proactive applications, which have become popular in many domains.This demo shows the monitoring of incoming events as a means to detect possible problems in the course of business processes using a dependency model.Contemporary modeling tools lack the capability to express the event semantics and relationships to other entities. This capability is useful when the events are based on a dependency model among business processes, applications and resources. The ability to express an event by employing a general dependency model, an to use it through a designated event correlation monitoring tool, enables the accomplishment of tasks such as impact analysis and business processes monitoring, including prediction of violation of constraints (such as: service level agreements).This demonstrated tool provides the system designer with the ability to define and describe events and their relationships to other events, objects and tasks. The model employs various conditional dependencies that are specific to the event domain. The demo shows how systems (business processes) are monitored using the dependency / event model, by applying rules using an event correlation engine with strong expressive power.This demo proposal describes the generic application development tool, the middleware architecture and framework and the demo.

Events are at the core of reactive applications, which have become popular in many domains. Contemporary modeling tools lack the capability express the event semantics and relationships to other entities. This research is aimed at providing the system designer a tool to define and describe events and their relationships to other events, object and tasks. It follows the semantic data modeling approach, and applies it to events, by using the classification, aggregation, generalization and association abstractions in the event world. The model employs conditional generalizations that are specific to the event domain, and determine conditions in which an event that is classified to lower level class, is considered as a member of a higher-level event class, for the sake of reaction to the event. The paper describes the event model, its knowledge representation scheme and its properties, and demonstrates these properties through a comprehensive example.

“Push Technology” stands for the ability to transfer information as a reaction to event occurrence. This demonstration proposal describes Amit, a middleware framework that resolves a major problem in this area: the gap that exists between events that are reported by various channels, and the actual cases in which the user needs to react to, hereby called; reactive situations. These situations are composition of events or other situations (for example, “when atleast four events of the same type occurred”) or content filtering on events (for example, “only events that relate to IBM stocks”) or both (“when atleast four purchases of more than 50,000 shares have been performed on IBM stocks in a single week”). This paper describes the generic application development tool, the middleware architecture and framework, and describes the demo.

The research in materialization of derived data elements has dealt so far with the if issue; that is, the question whether to physically store derived data elements. In the active database area, there has been some research on the how issue. In this paper, we deal with the when issue, devising an optimization model to determine the optimal materialization strategy. The decision problem confronted by the optimization model is more complex than "to materialize or not to materialize." The decision problem deals with devising the materialization strategy that consists of a set of interdependent decisions about each derived data element. Each decision relates to two issues:Should the value of a derived data element be persistent?What is the required level of consistency of a derived value with respect to its derivers?For each derived data element, the decision is based on both its local properties (complexity of derivation, update and retrieval frequencies, etc.) and its interdependencies with other derived values. The optimization model is based on a heuristic algorithm that finds a local optimum (which is a global optimum in many cases) in O(N2) and a monitor that obtains feedback about the actual database performance. This optimization model is general and is not specific to any data model. Our experimental results show that a predictor for the optimal solution cannot be obtained in any intuitive or analytic way, due to the complexity of the involved considerations; thus, there is no obvious way to achieve these results without using the optimization model. This fact is a strong motivation for applying such an optimization model. Our experimental results further indicate that the optimization model is useful in the sense that the system performance (with respect to the applications' goal function) is substantially improved compared to any universal materialization policy.

Coordination among computer integrated manufacturing databases has become one of the key difficulties in the implementation of an integrated system. The issue of how to implement interdependency among CIM databases has some alternative technological solutions, trading off various levels of mutual consistency against various levels of the system throughput. Although these alternatives and their formalization are important issues in the database theory perspective, this research deals with an engineering issue of devising a methodology to select among these alternatives in any given case. A heuristic optimization model, with worst time complexity of O(N 2) is presented. Its effectiveness is analyzed with a case study and a series of sensitivity analysis activations. This is a first attempt to solve this problem. Our empirical results show that the overall system performance, as reflected by a system's goal-function, is substantially improved by the use of our model, relative to intuitive or trivial solutions.

We introduce ICS, an intelligent collaboration service concept that integrates several technologies and methodologies to enable ad-hoc collaboration among parties in a certain organization or workplace. We use a rule-based situation management system capable of real-time massive event processing that drive a notification mechanism, and establishes collaborative situations among parties within a pervasive environment. For the medical care environment, we present a case study, provide a rationale, and offer a problem model for an instance where ICS can be deployed. We then assess the technological feasibility and need for ICS, which can also be applied in other domains that are even more demanding than the medical health domain.