Application of Complex Event Processing Paradigm in Situation Awareness and Management

This paper describes a novel approach to situation awareness and management in critical infrastructures using an emerging Complex Event Processing paradigm in combination with ECA (Event Condition Action) rules. Every modern infrastructural facility, especially critical ones, would want to catch or predict exceptions and threats at the earliest possible moment. The crucial prerequisite for this is a holistic and accurate situation assessment. To be able to assess the situation, evaluate the risk and provide decision support to the emergency managers, we need to define event chains that identify what is normal, compliant and expected, and what is exceptional and/or dangerous. These problems introduce a novel genre of applications - event-driven applications that make automated decisions based on a complex event or pattern of events, their detection, correlation and aggregation. In cases where an automated reaction is not possible, a recommendation is given to a human operator who remains in the control loop.