US Patent 10437635 Throttling events in entity lifecycle management

The disclosed declarative framework implements a machine for multi-step progression of interaction with an entity. The framework is usable for a broad range of applications—providing a simple rule-based authoring tool for specifying elements and components of a complex state machine, including state definitions, state transition triggers, state transition conditions and state transition actions. Case-status states, a first filtering condition, and a count parameter that specifies a limit on a number of times within a time period in excess of which additional events with characteristics that match will be ignored or discarded are usable to determine whether to ignore or process an incoming event—throttling the rate at which certain actions occur. A workflow engine gets loaded with instructions derived from the states and event filtering conditions, for handling incoming machine-generated events. Once defined, the state machine is automatically generated and implemented based on the declarative input provided.