The Event Model: short promo on YouTube

Following the first exposure of "The Event Model" in ER 2013,  we have produced a 5 minutes video clip explaining shortly the idea.  The screenwriters were Fabiana Fournier and Sarit Arcushin and the video was produced by Tammy Dekel, Hanan Singer and Chani Sacharen (who is also the narrator). 

The video clip issues a call for partnership in investigating this model -  either by working with us on use cases to validate the model, or working with us on the challenges in further developing the model.

On Rolls Royce's engine health management

In DEBS 2013, Roger Barga from Microsoft mentioned in his keynote talk that Rolls Royce is proposing to its customers a model of engine hours as a service, and used it as an example that event processing can be enabler of changing business models.    I recently talked with somebody about these type of systems and decided to follow up and learn more about the Rolls Royce system using the available information on its website.   The service is enabled by "Engine Health Management" (EHM)  The illustration above shows some of the engine sensors.   The monitoring follows the scheme: Sense-Acquire-Transfer-Analyze-Act.

The sense phase deals with the activation and capture of the sensors.

The acquire phase stands for a combination of routing reports in various milestones (takeoff, climb, summary at landing)  and detection of abnormal situations (this is the "derive" part of event processing).

The transfer phase deals with the communication to the ground operation  center

The Analyze phase is a manual phase that take the input from the previous phases and adds manual control and decision about next actions 

The Act phase deals with the actions required -- such as servicing and part replacement and determine the urgency and location.

This is consistent with the 4D (Detect-Derive-Decide-Do) model.  Here the decision is mainly manual.  It seems that this is one of the early cases where the use of sensors and event-driven applications are used to employ new business models.   More on business models change  -- later. 

From health persona to societal health by Ramesh Jain

Ramesh Jain uploaded interesting presentation to slideshare. The presentation entitled "From health persona to societal health"  talks about using personal events based on mobile devices to connect sick people to medical services upon detection of situations.     It seems that the area of mobile and personalized healthcare is an emerging area of using events coupled with mobile devices.    This can also be a good area for use of non programmer control (e.g. physicians) on situation detection applications.   I'll write more on this combination soon.  

More on event processing and mobile devices

More than a year ago I have first written about event processing and mobile devices, and illustrated this picture, showing the possible roles of mobile devices as producers, consumers, front-end and dashboard carrier.   Now I am concentrating on the "EPA on mobile", which means that mobile devise (phone, tablet, smart sensor etc...) can host the actual execution engine of event processing.  One of the questions raised is why is it needed, typically people think on mobile devices as end points,  front ends, and collection points, while the actual processing is executed on a server (cloud, mobile back-end server etc...).  

There might be multiple reasons to run event processing on mobile:

First -- mobile devise may be off-line (e.g. when I am travelling abroad, wherever there is no WiFi connection, my mobile phone is in off-line, since mobile data connection is very expensive out of the country).  

Second -- there are various sensors attached to a mobile device,  whether these are the internal sensors of the devise itself, or a sensor network wired locally to a mobile devise (e.g. tablet).   In many cases events are emitted frequently, and raw events are relevant only at the local level.  Sending them to the back-end requires both communication cost, and has high toll on power consumption, which is still the weak spot of mobile devices.   

Third --- there are also privacy considerations,  such as processing events that the owner does not want to share with the rest of the universe.

Recently I have learned about some implementations done now in this area, they are hybrid implementations, certain part of the overall logic might run on a mobile device, while part might run in the back-end.

running open source event processing on mobile devices.   I guess that this will see much more of it, as the world moves to mobility, and to the Internet of Everything.    

On the PLAY project

I have spent this week some time in cold Brussels, in my role of reviewer of the PLAY project, which was a project in the framework of the ICT program of the European Union.    There are quite a few projects that have event processing at their core, in fact early in 2014 we'll be involved in two new projects: SPEED and FERARI, about which I'll write in a later phase.  Being a reviewer, I accompanied the PLAY project since its beginning -- starting with the "kick-off" review, and continuing to the three annual reviews.  As a reviewer, my role is both to evaluate what was done and provide comments and evaluations, and also to be a kind of mentor for the project and try to help them going in the right direction.    The project has evolved during these years, started with event-driven services as a motivation, and in addition touched topics like Internet of Things and events coming from sensors.   It uses RDF and semantic web technology to describe events and patterns, and also plays with the idea of event marketplace, an idea that deserves more discussion in one of the next posts. As for the event processing part, they have developed distributed ETALIS,   I guess that this will be replaced if they want to take it to the real life, as logic programming based languages are great for the few people who understand how to program with them, and a barrier to others.  While this is a research project, and in real-life setting  this implementation will probably be replaced, the approach taken have a promise.  There will also be some follow-ups to this project, which is something that is desirable for these projects, the "after life".   On the whole, this is an opportunity both to assist and to learn, and I hope to hear about the "after life" in the future.  

On Dynamic M2M Event Processing

M2M is one of the realizations of the Internet of Things which attracts a lot of work recently.  Event Processing is in the core of such applications. They don't work in the traditional Internet model of - store and search, but they are intended to alert or act now.     
An interesting presentation from Eclipse Con 2014 (planned for March 2014) is entitled "On  Dynamic M2M Event Processing".  This presentation (marked as a draft) is  by  Hitachi and Oracle.    It talks about event processing within remote devices embedded within   the OSGi component model.  Worth reading -- and we'll see a lot more in this direction. 

On ER 2013

This week I have spent several days in Hong Kong attending the ER 2013 conference.  I have attended this conference several times before, but not recently, and came back due to the fact that I have renewed interest in conceptual modeling due to my work on event modeling.    It was interesting to observe what are the key topics today in conceptual modeling research.    The keynote speakers by  David Embley. Surajit Chauduri and Marie-Aude Aufaure have all dealt with conceptual modeling in big data, enterprise analytics and business intelligence, so this seems to be the key interesting topics. Other topics were the classic topics like: business process modeling, data semantics, and ontology based modeling.     Conceptual modeling has contributed as means of providing abstractions over computing and data, where modeling play a vital role in the current IT industry, moreover, we see standards emerging in various areas such as BPMN and recently DMN.   You can look at the conference program to get a feeling on the various presentation.   This was my 5th visit in Hong Kong over the last 9 years and this place has its own charm.