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Why do we need Event Processing?

Events matter in every business. An event can be understood as anything that happens, a financial trade, a purchase order, or a sensor reading. Most businesses today rely on a complex and dynamic interplay of events. Orders are cancelled, packages get lost, and customers show untypical behavior. In their operations, companies are confronted with millions of events, planned or unplanned, every day. The pace of business requires them to identify and react to important events faster than ever. But people are overwhelmed by the steadily increasing volume and heterogeneity of event data and thus unable to extract the relevant knowledge to take full advantage at the right time.

What is webMethods Business Events?

webMethods Business Events is Software AG’s comprehensive product for in-flight analysis and real-time visualization of high-volume event data. At the heart of this product is a Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine that enables companies to extract meaningful events, detect patterns and outliers, and compute forecasts from live and historical data on-the-fly. The tight integration into the webMethods Suite helps to rapidly develop event-driven applications that can trigger actions to dynamically adapt processes to changing conditions or notify users to take advantage of anticipated bottlenecks, problems, and opportunities.

Learn more about webMethods Business Events:

How is ARIS MashZone involved?

webMethods Business Events leverages CEP in combination with the powerful real-time dashboarding capabilities of ARIS MashZone to provide enterprises a holistic picture of what is happening right now: live business insights. The increased situational awareness helps enterprises coordinate the right response at the right time, leading to faster and better decisions.

With MashZone, live business events can now be easily integrated with databases, spreadsheets, web services and mapping technology to create interactive mashup dashboards. The event-driven, real-time capabilities of our visualization solution enables dashboards to be rapidly constructed which consume business events from the CEP Engine and render this data instantaneously in the form of a wide variety of graphical indicators and charts to help business and operations staff alike to have a real-time insight into key business processes and their performance. In addition, data feeds from historic data stores and applications can be used to augment dashboard capabilities into a ‘mash up’ style application which can help provide additional context for informed decision making.

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How does it work?

Integral part of webMethods Business Events is a CEP engine, which does the heavy lifting: Each second tens of thousands of events can stream through this engine. Each event is analyzed, can be compared with similar events seen before and once a pattern, an abnormality or other conditions have been detected the CEP engine emits new events.

This blog post’s example showcases a smart grid scenario in which smart meters continuously measure the current energy generation and energy consumption across Germany. The macro-economic view considers the different market players and a mix of energy from conventional power plants as well as renewable energies.

In this scenario, an event stream could consist of a power measurement, a timestamp when this measurement happened, and a location indicating where this measurement took place. Based on the real-time profiles for energy generation and consumption, webMethods Business Events can continuously compute the energy efficiency. This output can then be used in two ways:

  1. Proactive actions can be triggered to optimize the energy mix, i.e., in order to make better use of renewable energies and improve the carbon footprint by minimizing CO2 emissions.  This could be implemented by invoking a web service which – for instance – activates a pump station to leverage the currently unused wind energy in order to buffer it for later use.
  2. Visualization of real-time energy cockpits might be accomplished using MashZone. While being bundled with webMethods Business Events, MashZone ships with a new data source. This novel data source enables data feed editors to subscribe to event streams, such as the output streams of the CEP engine, and makes them accessible to MashZone.

As now results of the CEP engine materialize within MashZone’s data sources, they might be combined with additional feeds or handled as any other data source. And – being data feeds – results of the CEP engine could feed MashZone’s widgets: A speedometer which represents the energy efficiency. As the CEP engine continuously propagates events to MashZone that trigger updates of the dashboards, you always have up-to-date information available such as the current energy generation and energy consumption and you can immediately reflect the impact of changing weather conditions on the energy efficiency.



Authors: Stephan Freudl and Dr. Jürgen Krämer


Tags: process intelligence MashZone