Towards complex actions for complex event processing

Complex actions are a natural extension for complex event processing languages needed by many applications like emergency management. In particular interactions with external actuators that are common in those applications pose challenges that need to be adequately covered. Many approaches towards actions and reactivity in event processing are, however, either too simple or too formal to model complex composite actions in a convenient manner or require a complete knowledge of the actions and of their effects. This article proposes a pragmatic yet generic approach to complex actions in event processing which adapts to the heterogeneous and incomplete nature of physical actions. The article furthermore introduces a static semantic analysis for rejecting incorrect and undesirable programs which scales with the available information without requiring an a priori, or complete, knowledge of the actions and their consequences. The article finally describes a transformation of complex actions into complex events queries making it rather simple to add complex actions to a wide range of event processing languages.