Agile IT Architecture

I just finished a proof of concept for a manufacturing customer on how to use a inference engine to process events coming from a Manufacturing Equipment System. Without breaking any confidential information, I just want to highlight the use cases, the proposed architecture, and give some example of rules. At the high level, the business use cases are real time fault detection and equipment monitoring. Equipments are tools running on the manufacturing floor. The manufacturing tools process parts. After a certain amount of work processed, a tool needs some maintenance and any parts assigned need to be inhibited so the MES can route these Work In Progress parts to equivalent tools. Tool can generate alarms, and the system can take preventive action and/or alert people to avoid bigger problem. So for fault detection a rule looks like: if Alarm_id == 36 then inhibit parts running on tool initiating the alarm, and send email and SMS message to floor manager I have to complete this rule set w...

I spent the last four months to dig into Complex Event Processing offerings and especially how BRMS and CEP can work together to support new type of business applications, and to move to agile IT architecture. As stated by Professor David Luckham in his book the ‘Power of events’: future applications need to address the following problems Monitor events at every level of the IT systems Detect complex patterns of events, consisting of events that are widely distributed in time and location of occurrence Trace causal relationship between events in real time. Take appropriate action when patterns of events are detected. Adding CEP engine within our IT architecture will help bring agility as we can define complex patterns of events, hot deploy them, execute them, and improve their scope by time. CEP solution today uses a language close to SQL to define statement which filters, aggregates, joins events, and applies pattern matching on stream of events. Those stateme...