timbass
Sat, 28 Jul 2007 03:58:26 +0000
I think James Taylor and my good friend Paul Vincent should be careful not to reduce CEP (accidentally or intentionally) to rule-based systems, and broaden their perspectives and blog entries. In the original work on CEP by Dr. Luckham, the point of CEP is to solve complex problems in many problem domains, many require backwards chaining, uncertainty principles, statistical methods and more. Rule-based systems are interesting and useful, congruent with expert-systems, but also have well documented limitations in the classes of complex problems they can efficiently address.
Both James and Paul have excellent backgrounds in rule-based systems and have worked together in this area; on the other hand, CEP is not simply “rules and events” or “rules with EDA” etc.
Dr. Luckam’s background as a distinquished professor at Stanford was AI, including debugging large scale distributed systems and performing complex network security research for DARPA. In all of these application areas, there is a known limit to the usefulness of rule-based approaches to address complex classes of decision support systems that require statistical methods to mitigate uncertainty. Rule-based systems are very useful, but they are suboptimal for the challenges of more complex decision support services that are better addressed by statistical and stochastic methods designed for systems with uncertainty - the problem set addressed by Dr. Luckam’s original CEP work.
I enjoy reading James and Paul supporting each other in the area of rules-based approaches to CEP; but I hope the “business rules folks” will keep in mind that CEP was designed to be significantly broader than rule-based decision support.



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