Complex event processing

Event processing is a method of tracking and analyzing (processing) streams of information (data) about things that happen (events), and deriving a conclusion from them. Complex event processing, or CEP, is event processing that combines data from multiple sources to infer events or patterns that suggest more complicated circumstances. The goal of complex event processing is to identify meaningful events (such as opportunities or threats) and respond to them as quickly as possible.

These events may be happening across the various layers of an organization as sales leads, orders or customer service calls. Or, they may be news items, text messages, social media posts, stock market feeds, traffic reports, weather reports, or other kinds of data. An event may also be defined as a "change of state," when a measurement exceeds a predefined threshold of time, temperature, or other value. Analysts suggest that CEP will give organizations a new way to analyze patterns in real-time and help the business side communicate better with IT and service departments.

The vast amount of information available about events is sometimes referred to as the event cloud.

Among thousands of incoming events, a monitoring system may for instance receive the following three from the same source:

From these events the monitoring system may infer a complex event: a wedding. CEP as a technique helps discover complex events by analyzing and correlating other events: the bells, the man and woman in wedding attire and the rice flying through the air.

CEP relies on a number of techniques, including:

Commercial applications of CEP exist in variety of industries and include algorithmic stock-trading, the detection of credit-card fraud, business activity monitoring, and security monitoring.

The CEP area has roots in discrete event simulation, the active database area and some programming languages. The activity in the industry was preceded by a wave of research projects in the 1990s. According to the first project that paved the way to a generic CEP language and execution model was the Rapide project in Stanford University, directed by David Luckham. In parallel there have been two other research projects: Infospheres in California Institute of Technology, directed by K. Mani Chandy, and Apama in University of Cambridge directed by John Bates. The commercial products were dependents of the concepts developed in these and some later research projects. Community efforts started in a series of event processing symposiums organized by the Event Processing Technical Society, and later by the ACM DEBS conference series. One of the community efforts was to produce the event processing manifesto

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