NEEL: The nested complex event language for real-time event analytics

Abstract

Complex event processing (CEP) over event streams has become increasingly important for real-time applications ranging from health care, supply chain management to business intelligence. These monitoring applications submit complex event queries to track sequences of events that match a given pattern. As these systems mature the need for increasingly complex nested sequence query support arises, while the state-of-art CEP systems mostly support the execution of only flat sequence queries. In this paper, we introduce our nested CEP query language NEEL for expressing nested queries composed of sequence, negation, AND and OR operators. Thereafter, we also define its formal semantics. Subtle issues with negation and predicates within the nested sequence context are discussed. An E-Analytics system for processing nested CEP queries expressed in the NEEL language has been developed. Lastly, we demonstrate the utility of this technology by describing a case study of applying this technology to a real-world application in health care.