A mechanism to enable spatial reasoning in JBoss Drools

Reasoning systems tapping into the physical world often have to deal not only with temporal relations but also with spatial relations while performing complex event processing. Spatio-temporal relations are a special kind of relations as all events are intertwined via these relations. Treating spatiotemporal relations similarly to other relations will have a significant negative impact in the system performance while reasoning. Therefore, spatio-temporal relations have to be treated differently. JBoss Drools 6 is a production rule system which provides facilities for complex event processing with temporal relations but currently lacks capabilities for spatial reasoning. In this paper, we introduce a mechanism which provides such a capability. The mechanism is implemented directly in the events therefore no Drools source code modifications are necessary. The feasibility of such a mechanism is evaluated from the performance viewpoint. With our spatial reasoning implementation in place, Drools can be claimed capable for spatio-temporal complex event processing.