Articles by Veselin

April 4th, 2019

A guide to rules engines for IoT: Finite State Machines

What are finite state machines? A state machine can be used to describe the system in terms of a set of states that the system goes through. A state is a description of the status of a system that is waiting to execute a transition.…
2 mins read

April 1st, 2019

A guide to rules engines for IoT: CEP Engines

What are CEP engines? Although part (and predecessors) of stream processing engines, Complex Event Processing engines deal with events in a slightly different (and better) way than their bigger and younger siblings. We see CEP engines being deployed in edge computing nowadays, where locality, low…
2 mins read

March 28th, 2019

A guide to rules engines for IoT: Stream Processing Engines

What are stream processing engines? Stream processing is the processing of data in motion―in other words, computing on data directly as it is produced or received (as opposed to map-reduce databases such as Hadoop, which process data at rest). Before stream processing emerged as a…
3 mins read

March 26th, 2019

A guide to rules engines for IoT: Decision Trees

What are decision trees? A popular way of capturing the complexity of conditional rules is by using decision trees, which are graphs that use a branching method to illustrate every possible outcome of a decision. What are some examples of using decision trees in the…
4 mins read

March 22nd, 2019

A guide to rules engines for IoT: Flow Processing Engines

What are flow processing engines? Flow based programming is a programming paradigm that defines applications as networks of "black box" processes. These processes, a.k.a functions, are represented as nodes that exchange data across predefined connections by message passing. The nodes can be reconnected endlessly to…
6 mins read

March 19th, 2019

A guide to rules engines for IoT: Condition-Action engines

What are condition-action engines? Condition-Action based (CA) rules engines belong to the group of Forward Chaining engines, however there are some relevant differences, especially in the context of the IoT domain. AS oposed to forward chaining engines, Condition-Action rules engines don’t allow multiple conditions, which…
3 mins read

March 14th, 2019

A guide to rules engines for IoT: Forward-Chaining Engines

What is a forward chaining rules engine? An inference engine using forward chaining applies a set of rules and facts to deduce conclusions, searching the rules until it finds one where the IF clause is known to be true. The process of matching new or…
4 mins read

March 12th, 2019

Manage uncertainty and probabilities in IoT application development with the right rules engine

The uncertainty principle is an important element when building computer logic and probabilities can seriously affect conditional statements (rules) over time. If you are reading this post series in chronological order, you may remember the story about that time when you almost called the police on…
3 mins read