Friday, July 5, 2013

On actions and success criteria in event processing

I am now in Durham, North Carolina, the second stop in the USA business trip (that included 4th of July dinner with friends).   A reflection on one of the DEBS 2013 presentation given by Steffen Hausmann, a PhD student supervised by Francois Bry about "complex actions".   The model built specifies an action model for event processing.  The interesting insight is that unlike traditional systems where the success is determined by the successful completion of a task, event processing systems are goal-driven, an action goal is a reaction to some situation, and is intended to satisfy some goal with respect to this situation, for example: resolve a problem.   Thus in the presented model each action has success criterion that determines whether the action satisfied the goal.    In the presentation this criterion is an event, typically emitted by a sensor, but this can be generalized to a more comprehensive model.   The idea to define success criteria for actions as part of event processing system is very useful, and in a sense closes the loop of sense and respond.   

2 comments:

Rainer von Ammon said...

my goodness! too much resveratrol?! there is eve a kind of a discipline or bpm approach, the goal-oriented bpm. was this referenced by francois`pdh student? or do they reinvent the wheel?

BTW: let me try your captchas again... i'm not a robot

Opher Etzion said...

Hi Rainer. Too much singularity staff and you are not sure yourself if you are a robot or not :-)
The point is not reinventing goal-oriented programming, this was done in AI many years ago. The interesting point is that typically actions are not part of event processing models as they are considered as the "consumer's actions", and the built-in feedback mechanism as part of the model, which let's the desire specify "I would I know that the action succeeded". I think that the next phase will be to automatically infer the success criteria based on the situation's semantics - but this is additional PhD idea.

Opher