Drools: A Rule Engine for Complex Event Processing

Abstract

Drools is the leading Java based Open Source rule engine. It is a hybrid chaining engine meaning it can react to changes in data and also provides advanced query capabilities. Drools provides built in temporal reasoning for complex event processing and is fully integrated with the jBPM project for BPMN2 based workflow. Ongoing research in- cludes (but is not limited) to planning, ontological reasoning (semantic web), imperfect reasoning, truth maintenance and distributed collabora- tion through intelligent agents.This talk will provide an introduction into Drools what it is and how it works. We will explain the concepts of forward and backward chaining within the context of Drools as well as exploring the rule engine syntax and how it has been extended for temporal reasoning for complex event processing.