Edson Tirelli and Adam Mollenkopf are presenting on CEP. Temporal reasoning is only one of the components of CEP.

CEP is about processing a large amount of events and identifying the meaningful events out of the event cloud. CEP uses techniques such as detection of complex patterns, etc.

Fedex Custom Critical (high value, special needs) needed to create dynamic schedules to support special needs of the customers. They get information from the vehicles, shipment information, aircraft events, traffic flow, traffic incidents, etc.

Very interesting demo showing how they use all of the information is combined and displayed with a GIS system and it allows tracking of trucks and shipments to make sure deliveries are done on time and within the requirements that the customer had asked for.

Adam then covered the architecture of the system and then elaborated on the expected benefits of doing all of this.

Edson then took over the presentation to explain how Drools Fusion supports CEP. Temporal reasoning requires:

• A CEP enabled engine (time and events)
• Ability to express temporal relationships
• Requires a reference clock
• Requires support of temporal dimension

They have implemented the 13 temporal operators that Allen (missed the full name) identified in a research paper. Basically: before, meets, overlaps, finishes, includes, starts, coincides, after, metBy, overlappedBy, etc.

The reference clock defines the evolution of time and is required to synchronize time sensitive operations. They allow for clocks to be defined specifically for the domain the rules are working for.

Edson then went through some of the details of how things work behind the scene (temporal distance algorithm) and showed example rules.

Very interesting stuff. I found it very interesting to see a very practical example of how CEP can be used and I am impressed with how evolved Drools has become in such a short time working in that space.