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.   

On Dynamic EPAs by Berhnard Seeger

I came across a presentation by Berhnard Seeger entitled: "Dynamic complex event processing - not only the engine matters"  - the picture above is taken from that presentation.  Seeger uses the term "DEPA" for "Dynamic Event Processing Agent".   The dynamic refers to the ability to add/modify EPAs without affecting the event sources and event sources without affecting the EPAs, and ability to change EPAs at run-time (we haves supported this feature in Amit). 

The reference between all the players are indirect and done through meta-data entities.  There are other components to this model -- inclusion of actions in order to check contradictions, simulations for debug,

I totally agree that all these features are important (not sure that a new term is needed, this relates to implementation of EPA),  in fact we have worked on related issues in the past, see our paper in DEBS 2010 entitled: "analyzing the behavior event processing applications". 

In any event - interesting presentation, read and enjoy!