Modern day power systems in the restructured environment have grown to a level of complexity that the use of automation has become imperative for secure operation and control. The volume of significant events that occur in a multiarea interconnected power system has become enormous to an extent that system operators need intelligent systems to support them in decision making. This paper presents an implementation of complex event processor (CEP) for processing high level power system events from the perspective of a multi-area system. The definition and modeling of basic and complex high level events is carried out and an event processing engine is employed to process data streams in real time to detect the occurrence of the events. Online real time data on the high voltage Indian national grid is used in this paper for driving the CEP system with the objective of detecting the occurrence of complex events. The methodology, implementation and results of the proposed CEP system are presented. ©2010 IEEE.