CONCURRENT PROCESSING FOR EVENT-BASED SYSTEMS

According to the invention multiple shared-memory processors (11) are introduced at the highest level or levels of a hierarchical distributed processing system (1), and the utilization of the processors is optimized based on concurrent event flows identified in the system. According to a fir st aspect, so-called non-commuting categories (NCCs) of events are mapped onto the multiple processors (11) for concurrent execution. According to a second aspect of the invention, the processors (11) are operated as a multiprocesso r pipeline, where each event arriving to the pipeline is processed in slices a s a chain of internal events which are executed in different stages of the pipeline. A general processing structure is obtained by what is called matri x processing, where non-commuting categories are executed by different sets of processors, and at least one processor set operates as a multiprocessor pipeline in which an external event is processed in slices in different processor stages of the pipeline.