DISTRIBUTED PREDICTIVE AND EVENT-DRIVEN PROCESSING ENVIRONMENT

A distributed, predictive, event-driven processing environment is provided for controlling a number of elements characterized by different states and events. Transitions between states are reflected by predictive, event-driven, independent functions provided in the action subroutines and do not require state searches associated with fixed state machines. Action subroutines can be grouped together in various service groups which require similar event processing. Service groups are invoked by an action subroutine manager which can also access a application programming interface set. Processing of different elements can be spread across multiple processors or a single processor with the action subroutines having no knowledge of the number of processors.