On the Event Processing Conceptual Model

The event processing conceptual model shown above is a result of a work by an IBM internal team lead by my colleague Mamdouh Ibrahim. I have presented it in the "reference architectures" session of the last EPTS meeting, we have decided not to use the term "reference architecture" since it has multiple implementations, but this represents the different parts of an event-based applications. The three major building blocks are - event prodcuers, event processing network, and event consumers.

• Event producers - emit events in push or pull (periodic or on-demand).
• Event Processing Networks - process the events, create derived events where applicable, route the event to event consumers at the edge of the network
• Event consumers - consume the processed events and orchestrate/notify.

As you can also see the event processing network has two bridges - one to the producers and another one to the consumers, in which several of the functions of the EPN may reside.

We believe that this is a general enough conceptual model that can contain various variations.

Note that the "event processing network" requires an "event bus", this is a platform-independent term - in SOA environment - as noted in a previous posting the "event bus" converges with the "enterprise service bus". More deep description of the different ingredients - in later posts