A Formalization of Complex Event Stream Processing

Information systems in general, and business processes in particular, generate a wealth of information in the form of event traces or logs. The analysis of these logs, either offline or in real-time, can be put to numerous uses: computation of various statistics, detection of anomalous patterns or compliance violations of some form of contract. However, current solutions for Complex Event Processing (CEP) generally offer only a restricted set of predefined queries on traces, and otherwise require a user to write procedural code to compute custom queries. In this paper, we present a formal and declarative language for the manipulation of event traces.