CEP Engine vs Expert System

Question

What are the main differencees between a Complex Event Processing engine and an Expert System engine?

When should I use one or another?

Answer 1

A CEP engine will help if time has a strong influence in your decision model. For example : deciding to fire event X, if event Y and Z happen in the same given time window. Another example is the capability to aggregate events over time windows.

Another influence of time is latency constraint : ie. you want to process event in a short timescale (eg. 100ms or much less). CEP fits very well in that situation.

But both technologies are more or less complementary. In particular, some CEP tools have inference rules. Or you can have a first processing stage with a CEP engine (filtering, aggregation, composition of events), and then you query an expert system to decide what to do with your aggregated, complex event.

Here is an article about some use-cases of CEP that may help : Complex Event Processing

Answer 2

They are different. @MDE wrote about SEP, but expert system gives decisions. It do not process events, its task to give answer based on (X, Y, Z, ....) parameters. If you want to trigger events then it is CEP, but if you need analyzes of them, so it's expert system. As @Bob wrote, thay can be used together: CEP to capture event Expert System to "think of it" And then, SEP to fire it back, for example.