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What businesses need today is something that will perceive and identify various diverse events
that occur within and across the organization, which may result and lead to a significant
condition, problem, or opportunity that requires an immediate response or human intervention.
These events may occur in a specific pattern or trend and may result to a specific outcome that
could likely make an impact to the company either in a positive or a negative way. TIBCO
BusinessEvents is a leading software in complex event processing that addresses the concern of
responding to certain conditions or situations before they occur by processing or executing
predefined rules. In this document, you will learn more about what TIBCO BusinessEvents can
do, its features and advantages, and how easily you can define and make use of its resources.

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Complex Event Processing is an event processing technology that processes events

uninterruptedly. It is different from other event processing technologies because it treats all
events as potentially significant and aims to identify meaningful events within the event cloud. It
employs techniques such as detection of complex patterns of many events, event correlation and
abstraction, event hierarchies, and relationships between events. You can use the data gathered
by your car sensors, for example, to generate certain types of events. These car sensors measure
the change in pressure of tires over time. If it detects that there is a dramatic drop in tire pressure
within a small amount of time, it may send out a "lossOfTirePressure" event, notify the driver
about the situation, and respond by slowing down the car. You can see that before the car
experiences a flat tire, the system sends out a notification; thus, the problem that is likely to
occur is prevented from happening. TIBCO BusinessEvents is a software that specializes in
Complex Event Processing. It analyzes the cause and impact of different meaningful events and
how to respond to those that may be considered as a potential harm or benefit. It also works on
correlating massive amount of data about many events and applying specific rules to identify
situations that require a response. BusinessEvents is "proactive", which means that it responds
before problems arise and opportunities come; thereby, eliminating possible complications that
may happen and grabbing the chance or opportunity to gain leverage in business.





  
 



 
 
  

One aspect is about knowing the state of persons, objects, or entities in your business. It is
monitoring of certain events and observation of certain performance indicators or criteria.
Another aspect is about detecting significant facts about persons, objects, or entities in your
business and responding to specific conditions that occur. The last is about tracking information
over a period of time and tracing pertinent data that may result to a problem or an opportunity.

  
 

 



  
 


  





 


 
 

 

These models are the Event model, Concept model, Rule and Ruleset model, Rule Functions, and
State model. The event model provides inputs into BusinessEvents through the event properties
and optionally their XML payload. The Concept model refers to data concepts mapped from
events properties or payload, or other means into BusinessEvents. Rules provide the behavioral
mechanisms in BusinessEvents and are composed of the declarations, optional conditions, and
actions. Rulesets serve as containers of related rules. Rule functions refer to algorithms,
procedures, or functions, which have arguments and a body. They are reusable components in
BusinessEvents projects. State model refers to some state machine or state model representation,
which describes the states that an entity can hold, the transitions allowed between the states and
the conditions for such transitions.




 

  

Channels represent a physical connection to a resource such as Rendezvous daemon or Java

Message Service. Destinations are contained in only one channel and represent listeners to
messages from that resource, and they can also send messages to that resource.





  

 

There are three types of channels: TIBCO Rendezvous channels, JMS Channels, and Local
channels. TIBCO Rendezvous channels use the Rendezvous daemon as a connection resource
while the JMS Channels use the JMS as a connection resource. Local channels are used to route
events to multiple rule sessions. Rule sessions refer to an instance of the BusinessEvents engine.

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Serializers are used by BusinessEvents to convert events to messages while deserializers are used
by BusinessEvents to convert messages to events.

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The three types of events supported are the simple event, time event, and advisory event. When
called event, this refers to a simple event which defines an object that represents an activity such
as debiting an account, logging an employee, or suspending a fraud account. You can define the
properties of simple events. Time events are timers that are used to trigger rules. There are two
types: the repeating time event which repeats every specified interval and the rule-based time
event which is asserted into working memory after a specified period of time. Rule-based event
can be done by using the ontology function provided in BusinessEvents. Lastly, the advisory
event is an event asserted into working memory when certain condition occurs such as
exceptions or errors, the failure of the BusinessEvents engine to invoke or call a BusinessWorks
process, and the success condition of engine startup or activation. You do not have to create or
configure an event of advisory type because it is automatically available for use in the resource
list when you add a resource to the declaration portion of a rule.

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Concepts are descriptive entities similar to object oriented concept of a class. They describe a set
of properties. For example, an Employee concept can have properties such as FirstName,
LastName, Salary, and Department. Concepts have property history and you can set the history
size to a number of values with their timestamp, which you want to keep in working memory or
a persistent storage. History policies can either be Changes only, which means values will be
stored only when they are modified or changed, or All Values, which means values will be stored
all the time even though they are not modified or changed. Concepts can also have inheritance,
containment, and reference relationships.

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Database concepts are BusinessEvents concepts created by mapping tables or views from a
database. Each row in a table represents one database concept instance, and each column
represents the properties of the database concept. Database concepts are different from
BusinessEvents concepts because you can perform database operations such as query, insert,
update and delete.

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A scorecard is a special type of concept that serves as static variables available throughout the
BusinessEvents project. Scorecards are used to track certain key factors. Unlike a BusinessEvent
concept, a scorecard is itself a single instance and not a description for creating instances. It is
created during design-time. Rules are used to view and update the values of the properties in a
scorecard.

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Rules provide the behavioral mechanisms in BusinessEvents. A rule is composed of the

declaration of entity types such as events or concepts, optionally one or more conditions, and an
action. The action is executed by BusinessEvents when all of the conditions evaluate to true or
there is no condition specified. BusinessEvents rules are declarative rather than procedural. This
means that there is no definite execution of these rules but you can specify a rule priority to
determine which rule or rules are executed first when certain condition occurs. The rule priority
is a number from 1 to 10 with 1 as the highest priority and 10 as the lowest priority. The default
value is 5. When you leave the rule priority to a default value, this means that the
BusinessEvents will be the one to choose or decide which rule will be executed when certain
condition occurs. Rules are contained within a ruleset which serves as a container of related
rules.

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State modeler is a Unified Modeling Language (UML) compliant application that allows you to
model the lifecycle of an instance. For each instance of a given concept, you can define which
states it can have and how it will change from state to state based on applicable rules. A state
model begins with a start state and ends with one or more end states. It is similar to a finite state
automaton. In between may be simple, composite and concurrent states connected by transitions.
A simple state is a state that has an entry and an exit action. A composite state is like a group of
nested folders that contain other states. A concurrent state allows multiple state flows to be
passed on. Transitions determine when an instance of a concept passes from one state to another
which is indicated by complex transitions, or from a state to itself which is indicated by self-
transitions.

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A rule function is an algorithm or method you write in BusinessEvents language for use in the
entire project. A rule function is composed of arguments and a body. It can return a value, for
example, integer, String, or boolean data type. It can also return void or no value. Rule functions
can be used as event preprocessors and can be executed during engine startup or shutdown.

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An event preprocessor is a rule function with one argument of type simple event. It performs
actions after an incoming message is converted into a simple event but before it is asserted into
working memory. This means that before a rule can process the simple event, the event
preprocessor executes certain tasks first.

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A virtual rule function is a rule function that has arguments but no body. Its implementation is
provided in the Decision Manager Business User Interface. The implementations are called
decision table classes or external classes since they exist outside the BusinessEvents engine.
Each row in a decision table forms a simple rule and collectively defines the body of the virtual
rule function.

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Decision Manager is a component of BusinessEvents. It is an Eclipse-based platform. Its friendly
user interface allows a non-technical user to write, test, and deploy business rules to the
BusinessEvents engine. Users who do not know programming or TIBCO BusinessEvents can
participate in the formulation of rules and rule functions and make their logic become part of the
overall BusinessEvents project. It is a client application to Rules Management Server and is
supported only in Windows platform.

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A Rule Management Server (RMS) is another component of BusinessEvents, which manages

decision projects and provides a mechanism for approval. It also provides user authentication,
decision project authorization, and other project management features. Decision Manager
communicates with Rules Management Server to check out decision projects, update local copies
of decision tables, and commit changes. RMS users can then approve or reject those changes.
What is nice in RMS is that it can be accessed remotely through a router or the Internet, which
means that it does not have to be installed on the user's machine.

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The BusinessEvents project is created by the user. He creates events, concepts, rules, and rule
functions. The project must contain at least one virtual rule function. The EAR file for this
project is built and the RMS user sets up an RMS project for it. The RMS user creates access
control files which define the appropriate personnel that can access the decision project, domain
model files which define what ontology resources the business user is allowed to utilize, and
others such as test files that contain data to test the decision table. After that, the RMS user starts
the RMS server and informs the business user that it is already running. The business user logs
into Decision Manager and requests for a decision project by checking it out and saving it to his
local computer. The business user creates one or more decision tables locally with a locally
running BusinessEvents engine started by Decision Manager automatically. The business user
commits the decision project for approval. The RMS user receives the request, reviews the
project, and then approves or rejects it. If he approves it, the RMS generates class files in a
known location on a production BusinessEvents engine or he can manually save it there. The
class files are either hot deployed to a running system or deployed when the BusinessEvents
system starts up. After this, the business logic defined by the business user is now part of the
BusinessEvents application.

  

With TIBCO BusinessEvents, you can identify significant events and information over time
within your organization. You can analyze the most likely impact of these events to your
business and prevent the occurrence of problems and grab every opportunity that comes to your
business. This prediction capability of TIBCO BusinessEvents makes it truly one of a kind and
the leading software when it comes to complex event processing. It also incorporates business
users to formulate rules based on their own expertise and integrate these rules in TIBCO
BusinessEvents. It is a fantastic way to collaborate in building projects and this results to higher
throughput, efficiency, and leverage in business.