A model-driven approach for facilitating user-friendly design of complex event patterns

•A model-driven approach for graphical definition of event patterns has been developed.•Domain experts do not have to write EPL code to define complex event patterns.•Complex event patterns are defined once and automatically transformed into any EPL.•Our model-driven approach is independent of the domain where CEP is used.

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is an emerging technology which allows us to efficiently process and correlate huge amounts of data in order to discover relevant or critical situations of interest (complex events) for a specific domain. This technology requires domain experts to define complex event patterns, where the conditions to be detected are specified by means of event processing languages. However, these experts face the handicap of defining such patterns with editors which are not user-friendly enough. To solve this problem, a model-driven approach for facilitating user-friendly design of complex event patterns is proposed and developed in this paper. Besides, the proposal has been applied to different domains and several event processing languages have been compared. As a result, we can affirm that the presented approach is independent both of the domain where CEP technology has to be applied to and of the concrete event processing language required for defining event patterns.