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IBM Research - Haifa

IBM Active Middleware Technology™

IBM Active Middleware Technology™ is a lightweight and agile complex event processing (CEP) engine. The engine helps customers lower the costs associated with changing business logic, by automating and monitoring business processes, and enabling on demand business environments. The unique capabilities of this domain have already been recognized by Gartner as an emerging market in which "enterprises will achieve new levels of flexibility and a deeper understanding of their business processes by applying the techniques of complex event processing to their daily work."

As opposed to simple mechanisms that detect single events, IBM Active Middleware Technology™ can detect complex situations that involve a context-sensitive composition of messages and events. This functionality is extremely practical when applied to the processing of input from multiple event sources--from a business, application or infrastructure perspective within different contexts. For example, such scenarios may involve SLA (Service Level Agreement) alerts and compliance checking applicable to the financial market, banking, and insurance industries.

IBM Active Middleware Technology™ uses WebSphere brokering technology, which is implemented through processing nodes. Using IBM Active Middleware Technology™, the nodes monitor the message flows. This enables IBM Active Middleware Technology™ to detect and react to situations that may be defined over multiple messages. Each node can be configured to monitor situations related to specific rules or events.

IBM Active Middleware Technology™ can be used to configure middleware that answers specific business needs. By enabling the middleware itself to reach more sophisticated conclusions, this technology serves to significantly enhance automation and efficiency.

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The following are some sample rules or events that can be monitored and detected using IBM Active Middleware Technology™:

  • Suspicious money transfers. Send notification if the total value of all withdrawals (ATM, check, etc.) in the last X days exceeds $Y (where X and Y are parameters that each customer can specify).
  • Fraud detection. Send an alert notification if two credit card purchases were made within one hour at a distance greater than 200 Km.
  • Market trends. Check for situations where the foreign exchange rate is up by more than X percent and the Dow Jones is up by less than Y percent as compared to yesterday's closing rate.
  • Stock trades. Send an alert when trades involving more than $10 million from preferred customers have failed within one hour of market closing.
  • Stock trades. Send an alert if the IBM stock goes up 3 percent within two hours and the Dow Jones has not gone up by more than 1 percent during the same period.
  • Financial markets. Send an alert if three problems occurred with unknown instruments during the last hour.
  • Customer care. Send an alert if the same request was reassigned to three agents and no answer was given to the requester.
  • Performance. Send a warning if the back office processing engine CPU utilization is above an 80% threshold and there are open orders worth $10 million that are exposed.
  • Trade lifecycle. Send an alert when counterparty data does not match for the trade lifecycle.
  • Workflow. Send a warning when manual resolution has not been executed within 30 minutes and the work item was delegated to at least two people.
  • Execution. Send an alert when the external exchange interface does not have a Notice of Execution message returned within 15 minutes of an order going out.
  • Service level agreements. Send an alert if three orders from the same platinum customer were rejected for the same reason during a 24-hour period.
  • Service level agreements. Send an alert if an order was sent for processing and no response was received within the time specified by the SLA.
  • Compliance checks
    • Non trivial credit breach policy. Send a report if a client performs more than X messages that cause a credit breach in one day, or if the breaching exceeds a certain threshold.
    • Regulatory constraints. Send a report for any bulk buy transaction that is performed in less than the regulatory time allowed after a bulk sell.
  • Aggregation. Report at a set time (e.g., the end of a business day) the number of purchase requests that were processed, their total dollar amount, and the average dollar amount.

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