On events and decisions

Recently there are a lot of traction around events and decisions, coupling events and business rules, talking about decision platforms and decision servers,  meta-modeling efforts and more.  Some blogs dealt with the relationships between business rules and event processing - such as: James Taylor, and recently Paul Vincent. 


It is interesting to try and classify all the relationships between events and rules,  this is a rather streightforward list, no big insights:

1.  An event trigerrs a notification to a person for manual decision.
2. A derived event that is generated by an event processing system using filtering, transformation, aggregation, pattern matching or any combination of the above;  the derived event triggers a notification to a person for manual decision.
3. The next phase in the evolution is that raw or derived event triggers an automated decision based on either predetermined rules  or triggering an optimization process that generates a decision.\
4. In some cases the event processing system is the one doing the decision, since the pattern matched is the essence of the decision (e.g. who won the bid? ) and the event processing system itself triggers an action which is the result of the decision.
5. The opposite direction is that decisions also emit events:  events can be emitted to track the decision process in case it is multi-state decisions (e.g. procurement approval),  to check consistency among decisions, or consequences of this decisions in light of other events, and to match decisions with their consequence events in order to evaluate the quality of the specific decisions.
6. Events can also trigger modifications in the decision process, e.g. tuning parameters in policies, change the rules' segmentations and more

There may be some more interactions,  but these seem to be the main ones.