On Event Processing Networks

Back in my office, with the machine-made coffee; starting the day by reading some stuff on the Web, and first I've seen David Luckham's request to write some prediction about the CEP market in 2009. It seems that I've misplaced my crystal ball, which probably means that I am not in the prophecy business recently. While there are things that are beyond our control, I think that the approach taken by Paul Vincent to talk about challenges is more constructive.

I agree that the one of the challenges is to define the borders of the area -- like other areas that have determined clear definition of their scope -- and maybe partition to sub-types. There are other challenges of interoperability -- how connectivity to many producers and many consumers of various types can be achieved, and also interoperability between event processors that can send events to each other. I view the EPTS work groups that will be launched hopefully later this month (and those who continue from the pre-EPTS era) as vehicles for the community effort to advance in these areas: the use-cases work group in defining the various sub-types, the language analysis one in working on required functions, the interoperability analysis one on interoperability issues, meta-modeling on the modeling perspective, and of course the glossary and the reference architecture as pivots in defining terms and relationships among them. We shall not finish all work in 2009, but my challenge to the community is to achieve significant progress in all of these during 2009, and make it the year in which much of the discipline will be defined.

In addition, I have also read with interest Philip Howard's short article on "Event Processing Networks" (Below is Philip's picture on the Web)

I have received it in direct Email from David Tucker, Event Zero's CEO, and later also found it on David Luckham's site. Anybody who reads my Blog may realize that I view the EPN as the
basis of the conceptual an execution model for event processing. Anybody who reads Philip's article may infer that EPN is a new concept invented by Event Zero, and this is not really true; Though Event Zero is indeed one of the first companies to implement an EPN based solution.
The glossary defines EPN as: set of event processing agents (EPAs) and a set of event channels connecting them. The glossary definition is very general and there can be many implementations that fit this definition. One view of EPN is as a conceptual model and implement it using existing tools, another view of EPN is as an execution architecture. With the few implementations of EPN right now we see the known phenomenon of the "Babylon tower" that I have written about in the past -- each implementation chooses its own set of primitives (in this case -- agent types).


The benefits of the EPN model is in its relative simplicity, generality, and its natural support in distributed environment and parallel processing (not for free, some more wisdom is required here!). My view is that the concept of EPN should be in the center of the event processing community efforts mentioned before --- from the fundamental theory to the execution optimizations. I'll write more on that in later Blogs.