With the rapid expansion of the Internet over the last 20 years, event-based distributed systems are playing an increasingly important role in a broad range of application domains, including enterprise management, environmental monitoring, information dissemination, finance, pervasive systems, autonomic computing, collaborative working and learning, and geo-spatial systems. Many different architectures, languages and technologies are being used for implementing event-based distributed systems, and much of the development has been undertaken independently by different communities. However, a common factor is an ever-increasing complexity. Users and developers expect that such systems are able not only to handle large volumes of simple events but also to detect complex patterns of events that may be spatially distributed and may span significant periods of time. Intelligent and logic-based approaches provide sound foundations for addressing many of the research challenges faced and this book covers a broad range of recent advances, contributed by leading experts in the field. It presents a comprehensive view of reasoning in event-based distributed systems, bringing together reviews of the state-of-the art, new research contributions, and an extensive set of references. It will serve as a valuable resource for students, faculty and researchers as well as industry practitioners responsible for new systems development.
