Complex Event Processing RSS News

vincent
12-18-2008 04:40 PM
As luck would have it, the end of TIBCO’s internal sales and training event in Las Vegas coincided with the best downtown snowfall in 30 years, with the inevitable result that McLarren airport shutdown, flights were delayed and cancelled, roads shut, and the TIBCO teams had an unscheduled extra night in casino-land.

It was interesting to see how the FAA, airport and airlines responded to the “complex events” resulting from incoming storms, snowfall, reduced visibility, etc [*1]. Local news reported that the airport claimed it was the visibility, not the snow, that was the problem (somewhat amusing to any fog-prone Europeans present). Somewhat ominously, they also admited to having no equipment for dealing with snow and ice - obviously the disruption of such weather every few years is not worth the expense of such equipment (to the airport, anyway).

First one airline, then others cancelled flights as the afternoon wore on into evening; some were optimistically stubborn in delaying cancellations, causing some of their customers the pain of travelling to the airport just to return later. Then, a few hours after the departure boards showed carnage, the airport put out a notice of the problems on their web site (woo hoo!). Which at least was better than the FAA, whose site seemed to be down (either that or McLarren posted a bad link). Clearly, some of these guys are not yet into the business of real-time customer information (or keeping customers happy).

By Thursday morning, the snow had stopped falling, the sun started shining, and the airlines started shifting passengers on their way again.

We’ll cover some of the “lessons learned” from the TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP sessions in Vegas in future posts; meanwhile, some interesting stats given were:

Notes:

[1] Interestingly, one of the airlines involved is operational with a TIBCO CEP system to help provide information to respond to “unforeseen schedule disruptions”.



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