Interval event stream processing

Event stream processing (ESP) has become increasingly important in modern applications, ranging from supply chain management to real-time intrusion detection. Existing ESP engines have focused on detecting temporal patterns from instantaneous events, that is, events with no duration. Under such a model, an event instance can only be happening "before", "after" or "at the same time as" another event instance. However, such sequential patterns are inadequate to express the complex temporal relationships in domains such as medical, finance and meteorology, where the events' durations could play an important role.