Specifying timing constraints and composite events: an application in the design of electronic brokerages

Increasingly, business applications need to capture consumers' complex preferences interactively and monitor those preferences by translating them into event-condition-action (ECA) rules and syntactically correct processing specification. An expressive event model to specify primitive and composite events that may involve timing constraints among events is critical to such applications. Relying on the work done in active databases and real-time systems, this research proposes a new composite event model based on real-time logic (RTL). The proposed event model does not require fixed event consumption policies and allows the users to represent the exact correlation of event instances in defining composite events. It also supports a wide-range of domain-specific temporal events and constraints, such as future events, time-constrained events, and relative events. This event model is validated within an electronic brokerage architecture that unbundles the required functionalities into three separable components - business rule manager, ECA rule manager, and event monitor - with well-defined interfaces. A proof-of-concept prototype was implemented in the Java programming language to demonstrate the expressiveness of the event model and the feasibility of the architecture. The performance of the composite event monitor was evaluated by varying the number of rules, event arrival rates, and type of composite events.