An active event monitoring strategy for an efficient ECA rule management and its implementation into e-commerce service

Abstract

Electronic commerce (E-commerce) has been one of the most popular Internet-based applications in which a variety of purchase-related requests and process-related operations can be viewed as application events. An event requires a set of program actions according to the pre-defined business rules called active rules. The active rule based services provide automatic and reliable electronic business process for the application of the future. To the active rule systems, a real-world business process is viewed a set of predefined events and required actions to be executed based on the intended business rules and strategies. One of the important research issues in active rule management system is how to make the application events valid to the system so that needed actions are carried out in efficient ways. Business applications contain a number of events specified in the form of programs known as methods. Most of existing systems employ event notification approach with method wrapping scheme. In those systems, method wrapping is required for the application to notify events to the active rule management facility. Among them is our own development of event detector as the major rule processing component of Active Information Management System (AIMS), which employs an event notification mechanism using method wrapping. The method wrapping strategy has the problem of interdependency between the applications and the active rule management facilities. This will require the application programmer``s knowledge about the event detection mechanism of the active rule manager when programming. The dependency will also result in inefficiency when the events and rules have to be modified due to the change of business rules. Also, the tightly-coupled application-rule structure will not allow the reuse and sharing of the application programs (i.e., methods). The proposed event detection strategy presented in this thesis is based on the concept of active event monitoring rather t...