CEP in the 1960s: Air Traffic Control
Professor Luckham wrote about CEP and the future of global Air Traffic Control (ATC) in The Future Event Driven World: Global Air Traffic Management. One of the first commercial applications of complex event processing was in the early 1960s in the field of commercial aviation, for example see the history of Air Traffic Control.
Although experimental use of computers in ATC had begun as early as 1956, a determined drive to apply this technology began in the 1960s. To modernize the National Airspace System, the FAA developed complex computer systems that would replace the plastic markers for tracking aircraft. Instead, controllers viewed information sent by aircraft transponders to form alphanumeric symbols on a simulated three-dimensional radar screen. By automating some routine tasks, the system allowed controllers to focus on providing separation. These capabilities were introduced into the ATC system during the ten years that began in 1965.
Applying a phrase like “complex event processing” to a subset of software on the market today certainly does not negate all the CEP applications that existed long before the phrase was coined or became popular. Global ATC has been defined as a future use case for CEP. Obviously, early ATC history, where processing complex events goes back as far as the early 1960s, is quite significant to our understanding of CEP/EP.
Event processing applications, including complex event processing applications, have been around for over 40 years. There has been four decades of both commercial and military event processing and CEP applications. ATC is only one example of myriad historical commercial applications of complex event processing.
Note: This post was adapted from my post in the Earliest applications of commercial CEP.
Filed under: CEP News and Events, CEP Tutorials, Complex Event Processing, Event Processing, Systems Engineering, Use Cases
Interesting post, Tim.
I remember in my early days in this business reading a paper by D Parnas describing in a fair amount of detail an event processing system for an embedded cockpit management application for the military. Like much of what he wrote, it was quite clear and, at least for me, illuminating.
I think another big area where these event based systems (to use some sort of neutral descriptor) are king is embedded systems. They are interesting too because they combine the operational aspects (we need to have the thing working) to the embedded real-time diagnosis aspects (which end up relying on technology that in our enterprise world we put under CEP / Continuous Intelligence / KPI tracking, etc…).
Disseminating this kind of information on historical applications is illuminating for us.
Thanks.