Many of TIBCO’s Complex Event Processing customers use CEP for operational intelligence types of tasks in industries like transportation and logistics as well as financial services, healthcare and government. Many of these CEP users also use Operations Research techniques, usually in separate and specialist departments or groups, exploiting technologies like constraint programming / CP and mathematical programming / MP to optimize issues such as route schedules, configurations, marketing, etc – the classical example being the “travelling salesman problem“.
The interesting area to note is that “optimizations” are event-driven – some sequence of events will normally occur to require “re-optimizing”. This could be something as simple as a route perturbation disrupting a daily travel schedule, or an anticipation or prediction of some complex event. This is of course the domain of CEP. Furthermore, the event *data* can be the same data required for the optimization solvers.
Interestingly, at the INFORMS OR event this week, it is clear that the OR tools have to handle multiple aspects of data access. Some recognize that in future they may be dealing with data grids (or even clouds of data / events). They are especially working on parallel-based (albeit not necessarily distributed-based) algorithms for maximizing performance. This, of course, is yet another parallel with the CEP world – tools like TIBCO BusinessEvents provide a high performance multi-agent compute grid + data grid mechanism that allows for different agent technologies – including “optimization agents” – to exploit the same platform as the event processing… subject maybe to controlling event data stability during optimization. Could it be that CEP provides the means by which OR breaks into the “mainstream” of business consciousness?
