Towards a logic for inferring properties of event streams

Abstract

We outline the background, motivation, and requirements of an approach to create abstractions of event streams, which are timetagged sequences of events generated by an executing software system. Our work is motivated by the need to process event streams with millions of events that are generated by a spacecraft, that must be processed quickly after they are received on the ground. Our approach involves building a tool that adds hierarchical labels to a received event stream. The labels add contextual information to the event stream, and thus make it easier to build tools for visualizing and analyzing telemetry. We describe a notation for writing hierarchical labeling rules; the notation is based on a modification of Allen Temporal Logic, augmented with rule-definitions and features for referring to data in data parameterized events. We illustrate our notation and its use with an example.