So how are Complex Event Processing Platforms used now to solve business problems? Certainly over the past few years, this technology is being used across most, if not all, of the different types of industries.
The financial services capital markets companies are using this technology for real-time algorithmic trading and real-time risk management types of solutions. As the stock markets stream their endless financial instrument data with values which can instantly fluctuate, there is an ever growing need to effectively handle this huge volume of information, understand its impact and potential risk, and then react as quickly as possible. The better the capability to evaluate and predict the consequences of the information, and the quicker the ability to respond to the results of this analysis, the more successful the business and the more money that can be made with less exposure to business risks and threats. This type of real-time trading information can be usually visualized using heat maps and scatter charts.
In the Electricity industry, customers are using the Complex Event Processing (CEP) platform for many new types of applications, which include Smart Meter, Smart Grid, and outage detection monitoring solutions. Sophisticated Demand Response (DR) solutions bring together system operators and the power generation companies, who contract with energy management and monitoring companies to provide energy usage load reduction services on demand. These technology companies that are using CEP-based applications contract with commercial and industrial businesses that are large consumers of energy, whom agree to curtail energy usage on demand. Streaming event devices are installed at client locations to measure energy usage and, in some cases, proactively control the load using continuous energy demand and usage data at minute or, even second, intervals. The generated profit revenue received from system operators is then passed back to the clients, relative to the number of associated load reduction dispatches.
Handling real-time events has a long history in the telecommunications industry, such as those generated by the various devices on the network, events from mobile phones, or perhaps streaming Call Detail Record (CDR) events indicating the time of calls made and whether some of these calls failed. Complex Event Processing platforms provide the technology for many new applications and solutions in this domain. As in other industries, Event-Driven platforms have a broad base of possible implementations. Some businesses have created powerful network management and monitoring solutions, which can detect hardware failure-related events continuing over certain time periods, or situations where equipment has not been issuing events for some time and in these circumstances alert messages are distributed and escalated.
In the context of an enterprise-level mobile telecommunication IT infrastructure, there are many different applications coming from many different suppliers. When the overall performance is not immediately meeting expectations, it's not easy to identify which component is the offending issue in the supply chain. Therefore these next-generation management and monitoring applications (based on Complex Event Processing) provide the capabilities to show the complete, holistic "picture", providing full visibility to the situation of a business through flexibility and fully integrated features, enabling agility for the infrastructure to react quickly to changing scenarios, and providing full operability enabled by a solution designed to meet business needs.
A very powerful capability of Complex Event Processing platforms which is being leveraged in the Transportation, Telecommunications, and Public Sector domain is real-time integrated spatial analysis.
A business can use this technology in applications where there is the need to monitor the movements of its assets and resources. Using, for example, GPS (global positioning systems) the movement patterns of someone, or something can be tracked in real time as it passes through boundary points (such as security checkpoints in an airport) to identify its route and, to some extent, predict where this person or object may subsequently move next. Also, this capability can be used to analyze a current position and its relationship to geofenced areas. A geofenced area being the definition of a geographical shape (polygon) defined or declared by a series of spatial coordinates.
When a resource gets near, inside, or enters and exits the geofenced area, various actions can be immediately performed, such as a warning message of an imminent exposure to a dangerous natural disaster, or offering a big discount on a second coffee at the person's current location or soon to be, position, based on his or her current movement pattern.
First Responder emergency services solutions can use integrated spatial technologies to not only monitor a fire or hundreds of simultaneous fires, but also dynamically track the movement on the fire, affected by weather conditions (wind) or igniting hazardous materials. These types of systems can evaluate immediately the relevance, importance, and applicability of all of the related assets (fire engines, police vehicles, and so on) close to these areas. For example, if a fireman does not move in certain number of seconds when close to a fire, this could indicate a serious life threatening situation.
There are many other types of business solution implementations using Complex Event Processing platforms that range from online retail monitoring systems, real-time data center infrastructure management, fleet vehicle transportation monitoring, traffic flow monitoring with variable toll charging and speed control, oil fields and rig monitoring/automation, and a host of real-time sensing device opportunities, where these devices can monitor the environment inside shipping containers, or air pollution situations. The scope and different type of applications that can now benefit from using Complex Event Processing technologies are evolving just as quickly as the world is changing, with a growing need to predict and pre-empt and in, some cases, prevent situations from even happening.
