Temporal reasoning and processes

Business rules allow us to define smarter processes depending on the contextual information we feed the rule execution engine. The combination of rules and processes is a very powerful mix that provides a way of merging specific sequence of actions with reactive behavior in a very performant way. It is now time to start learning about involving temporal information inside our rules definitions.

Adding temporal information such as fact time correlation, streams of data, or any live data will add a lot of power to your rule executions and their capacity to infer information from the real world. These procedures are encompassed in complex event processing (CEP), a methodology to infer complex situations out of simple ones, and Event-driven Architecture (EDA), which allows for a natural growth of applications that use CEP. We will see each of these concepts in detail.

Events and complex events

Before understanding CEP, we need to understand a series of other concepts...