| description |
The condition and location of a business item are of central
interest in many business applications such as supply chain
management, manufacturing, or ensuring safety and security for
people and goods. Recent advances in sensor technology allow to
transmit condition and location information about goods, materials
and people to enterprise software systems in real-time. In this
context, complex event processing is an emerging software technology
for detecting business-relevant situations in streams of events and
for providing these detected situations to various business
processes. While currently complex event processing systems are
mostly deployed within a single business domain at a limited scale,
the cooperative nature of business applications gives reason that
complex event processing will soon address multiple business domains
and involve an increasingly large number of business events. In
order to ensure interoperability as well as efficient utilization of
processing and network capability, we motivate the need for
heterogeneous correlation technology in the context of business
applications.
In this article we give an overview of the project \emph{Distributed
heterogeneous event processing} (DHEP) involving the IBM Böblingen
lab and the Universität Stuttgart. In particular, we highlight how
business applications can benefit from using event correlation
technology in heterogeneous environments. The key aspects of the
project address the deployment of collections of event correlation
rules to a network of heterogeneous event correlation engines. We
give an overview of challenges and possible solutions for the
dynamic configuration of such environments and present our
architecture which supports network-wide cooperation between
different correlation engines.
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