Holistic Event Processing

Future Applications of CEP

by David Luckham

Now here’s a question. How would you characterize the current generation of CEP applications?

Well, let’s consider what we have. There are applications in markets such as algorithmic trading and financial services, patient flow monitoring in hospitals, routing and crew scheduling in transportation, monitoring service level agreements in call centers, consumer behavior in on-line retailing, and airline baggage handling, just to name a few. Most of these applications are processing multiple event feeds, maybe hundreds of them, and different types of events. And they’re keeping track of state and timing too. The financial services applications are often computing very complicated statistics and averages over the data in events. These are not “simple applications.” But they tend to apply to related sets of problems within a small number of types of events.

I call the current generation of CEP applications “small event type space applications”. A “type space” is simply a set of types of something. …

In 10 years time some applications will be large event type space applications. This will happen when a system gets to the stage where it is unifying a number of smaller event processing applications that deal with problems in different type spaces, and it is attempting to leverage the interrelationships between them.  I call such a system a holistic event processing application. download the pdf article.