Last week I presented “4th Generation CEP” to the TIBCO NOW event in Zurich, Switzerland. Much more interesting than presenting, though, was listening to the presentation by customer SBB – the Swiss Railways. SBB clearly needs to take their SLAs seriously in order to maintain the level of timetable accuracy they are known for (their reputation for timeliness I believe exceeds even that of the German railway system). To enable “timeliness” they have constructed an IT architecture that used extensive high performance (e.g. TIBCO RV) messaging from track and train to operations systems, and used the events so passed in an “Event Constraint Processing” system to match incoming events with network constraints. The presentation ended with a remote log-in to view the live railway dashboard…
For more information on this, systems integrator CSC published a (high-level) article on this system in their house magazine earlier this year. And constraint processing in railway-style real-time systems is certainly not new – research papers and conference presentations abound on this topic. Nonetheless, Event-driven Constraint Programming (/processing) is probably another technology area that is ripe for commercialisation for domains beyond just railway networks…
