Scheduling Agents with Rules Engines
Paul Vincent of TIBCO talks about agents in his post, CEP and Agents…
At the core, TIBCO’s BusinessEvents is RETE-based rules engine and rules engines are well suited for scheduling problems. This makes perfect sense, since many of TIBCO’s customers deploy BusinessEvents in scheduling-oriented, not detection-oriented, solutions.
It begs to be pointed out, however, that scheduling is only one component of a CEP architecture.
Normally, the scheduling component of a distributed event processing architecture manages the intelligent scheduling of the sharing of data between distributed agents that are running a variety of analytics.
Simply stated, all agents are not rules engines; however, rules engines are often used to schedule the cooperation between analytical agents in a distributed agent-based architecture.
Filed under: Agents, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Business Event Processing, Business Optimization, Business Process Management, Business Rules, CEP Terminology, CEP Tutorials, Complex Event Processing, EAI ESB & SOA, Event Processing, Event Processing Language, Event Processing Modelling, Event Stream Processing, Event-Driven Architecture, Grid Computing, Message-Oriented Middleware, Modelling and Simulation, Process Optimization, Scheduling, Sensor Fusion, Systems Engineering, TIBCO
I’ve been wondering what kind of rule engine Tibco uses for a long time and couldn’t find out. I curious, how did you find out Tibco’s engine is RETE based? From the articles I’ve seen in the past, Tibo embedded other rule engines.
thanks
peter
It is well documented in the TIBCO BusinessEvents manuals that BE is RETE-based. In addition, TIBCO’s public TUCON (TIBCO Users Conference) BE sessions have discussed this; also some of TIBCO’s public white papers, for example their paper on fraud detection and predictive business, discusses how BE is RETE-based.
Also, there were many discussions on this topic by TIBCO employess in the various CEP groups on the net as well as presentations in the EPTS in 2005-2007.
thanks. Looks like I was looking in all the wrong places. On Tibco’s website I couldn’t find any description of the rule engine. I haven’t read any of the white papers, since it requires registering.
Anyone know if Tibco wrote their own, or licensed an existing engine?
peter
As far as I know Tibco wrote their own RETE engine a couple of years ago and have been improvising on it since then. The benchmarking numbers of their engine are pretty impressive.
Robin
Hi Peter,
This TIBCO thought leadership paper mentions RETE in the context of the TIBCO BusinessEvents product.
http://www.tibco.com/mk/2006/webtcep02-jun-06us.jsp
Cheers,
Greg
Thanks for the link. I finally registered and downloaded the paper. It doesn’t say much about their implementation. I’m curious to see how Tibco supports events and whether they support temporal logic with automated fact management. I wrote a paper on temporal logic extensions for RETE algorithm with a detailed description for calculating temporal distance. If Tibco supports temporal logic, it would be interesting to see how they tackle working memory management.
anyone have a link to published benchmarks for tibco’s rule engine?
peter
Hi Peter,
Similar to what Marc Adler at Citigroup mentioned about the technology details, I don’t believe that the majority of TIBCO’s customers are that concerned about benchmarks and implemention internals.
Also, TIBCO often goes into more technical details at their user conferences (for example, TUCON). I kindly suggest you contact TIBCO directly for more details.
Regards,
Greg
thanks for the info.
peter