Industry experience with the IBM Active Middleware Technology (AMiT) Complex Event Processing engine

Abstract

Complex event processing (CEP) is the analysis of event data in real-time to generate immediate insight and enable instant response to changing conditions. In this paper we share the experience we accumulated over the last decade in designing and deploying CEP applications using the IBM Active Middleware Technology (AMiT) CEP engine, a research asset developed at IBM Research - Haifa. Over the years we applied the technology in solutions for various industries, such as banking, insurance, healthcare, chemical and petroleum and more. In each scenario, the CEP engine was used to address different functional requirements including event-based routing, observation, monitoring and correlation. It was also often required to meet nonfunctional requirements such as scalability and transactional support. We describe several solutions from different domains in which AMiT played at least one of these functional or nonfunctional roles. Our experience shows that across the different industries and applications, using the CEP technology, independent of a specific engine implementation, has been consistently proven to be highly successful. It has played a vital role in designing the applications by providing a means to expressively and flexibly define and maintain the event processing logic of the application, and in runtime by being able to meet all the functional and non-functional requirements without taking a toll on the application performance. © 2010 ACM.