Facilitating the Adoption of Complex Event Processing for Internet of Things: Framework and Lessons Learned

This paper introduces a novel framework designed to significantly facilitate the adoption by software developers and domain experts of the entire lifecycle of Complex Event Processing (CEP) for IoT domains. Recognizing the challenges non-technical users face, the framework integrates tools and processes that facilitate synthetic data generation for testing, intuitive definition, storage, and deployment of event types and patterns, and crucial runtime management. It also supports the storage and visualization of generated complex events. Its central component is SEC-API4CEP, a secure RESTful API enabling dynamic deployment, updating, and undeployment of event patterns at runtime, overcoming limitations of existing solutions, with integrated security. By addressing these critical aspects, the framework empowers software practitioners to leverage CEP for real-time analysis and response without requiring deep technical expertise while also allowing domain experts to graphically design IoT patterns to be detected by the CEP engine.