IBM is currently exploring the CEP space with their Active Correlation Technology (ACT) initiative.
ACT is IBM's answer to handling CEP (complex events processing) - a little bit different than traditional "event rules" because CEP is designed to handle high capacity events and situational modeling - not just "returning an answer". CEP has been around for a little while, but just not formally called "CEP" - basically anywhere where high numbers of events occur simultaneously and situational content is derived e.g. In today's fighter planes – the onboard CPU takes in simultaneous flight data, targets, physical data, strategic data, etc. and processes it all into suggestions and actions for manual and automatic compensations. The distinction can be made: business rules and event rules are designed to simulate the decisions of one simultaneous person (make a loan decision, determine eligibility, etc) - CEP is designed to simulate the decisions of many simultaneous people (all of these events just occurred - what situation does that present, what decision(s) should be made, etc?)
David Luckham has developed a site dedicated to CEP. I am interested to watch as the paths of EDM and CEP continue to move towards each other. To my knowledge there are no COTS packages associated with either CEP or EDM to date...
As a business rule developer, I tend to notice that a good amount of business rules projects tend to be linear across the business. What I mean by "linear", is that I tend to notice projects that share a good amount of similarity between one project and another, all within the same business application. For example, Business_A has 5 separate rules projects, Project1, Project2, etc...
That being said, at what point does reusability, extensibility and consistency play a part in enforcing a robust and fruitful rule application, beyond the scope of the current requirements and utilization? Does it come into play during architecture? Implementation? Or does it fall all the way back in the Iterative cycle to flush out the best place to implement a scalable project?
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