The condition and location of a business item are of central interest in many business applications such as supply chain management, manufacturing, or ensuring safety and security for people and goods. Recent advances in sensor technology allow to transmit condition and location information about goods, materials and people to enterprise software systems in real-time. In this context, complex event processing is an emerging software technology for detecting business-relevant situations in streams of events and for providing these detected situations to various business processes. While currently complex event processing systems are mostly deployed within a single business domain at a limited scale, the cooperative nature of business applications gives reason that complex event processing will soon address multiple business domains and involve an increasingly large number of business events. In order to ensure interoperability as well as efficient utilization of processing and network capability, we motivate the need for heterogeneous correlation technology in the context of business applications.

In this article we give an overview of the project \emph{Distributed heterogeneous event processing} (DHEP) involving the IBM Böblingen lab and the Universität Stuttgart. In particular, we highlight how business applications can benefit from using event correlation technology in heterogeneous environments. The key aspects of the project address the deployment of collections of event correlation rules to a network of heterogeneous event correlation engines. We give an overview of challenges and possible solutions for the dynamic configuration of such environments and present our architecture which supports network-wide cooperation between different correlation engines.