In 1998 David C. Luckham and Brian Frasca published a paper, Complex Event Processing in Distributed Systems href="http://pavg.stanford.edu/cep/fabline.ps" class='external text' title="http://pavg.stanford.edu/cep/fabline.ps" rel="nofollow">Postscript Version}.
"Complex event processing is a new technology for extracting information from message-based systems." - David Luckham and Brian Frasca