Event-driven architectures can be used to enhance the flexibility of software system integration solutions by supporting flexible runtime changes of event processing rules, e.g., in complex event processing (CEP) engines. However, this often leads to integration solutions that are hard to maintain, complex, hard to reuse, and hard to understand. One reason are complex dependencies of events like high-level events mapped to low-level events or transformations of events between integrated systems (such as event aggregation, enriching, or splitting) that are hard to understand only by studying the interplay of various CEP rules. Another reason is tangled code spread across multiple artifacts including event processing code, event monitors, event listeners, event transformation code, existing system components that must raise or receive events. In this paper we propose to base integration architectures on event actors. Our approach consists of a model-driven event transformation framework that allows us to specify event actor based integration architectures as an architectural view (instead of tangled in the source code), as well as an event actor execution engine that supports the flexible deployment and enactment of the integration architecture. We show that a set of transformation-related enterprise integration patterns can be specified and flexibly enacted with our approach, the complexity is significantly reduced compared to purely CEPbased solutions, and a higher degree of reusability is supported.

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