Time to the Rescue - Supporting Temporal Reasoning in the Rete Algorithm for Complex Event Processing

Complex event processing is an important technology with possible application in supply chain management and business activity monitoring. Its basis is the identification of event patterns within multiple occurring events having logical, causal or temporal relationships. The Rete algorithm is commonly used in rule-based systems to trigger certain actions if a corresponding rule holds. The algorithm’s good performance for a high number of rules makes it ideally suited for complex event detection. However, the traditional Rete algorithm does not support aggregation of values in time-based windows although this is a common requirement in complex event processing for business applications. We propose an extension of the Rete algorithm to support temporal reasoning, namely the detection of time-based windows by adding a timeenabled beta-node to restrict event detection to a certain time-frame.