Philippe Lalanda Grenoble University Luc Bellissard and Roland Balter ScalAgent Distributed Technologies Asynchronous Mediation for Integrating Business and Operational Processes Integrating business and operational processes is necessary today to meet the market’s increasingly demanding requirements. In particular, it allows rapid decision-making, customized production, and short time-to-market. To address these challenges, the authors built a mediation suite on top of a message-oriented middleware to help develop e-services based on industrial data. This software, based on a domain-specific component model, meets stringent market requirements and is being used in real-life service applications. I n today’s world, a broad range of industries — from manufacturing to utilities — must be able to integrate business and operational processes. Specifically, they must seamlessly inte- grate application software that supports business activities with field devices. Such processes have been separate until recently, primarily because of technical issues, including incompatible program- ming paradigms, network heterogeneity, differing time scales, and the lack of appropriate integration tools. With the Internet’s emergence and the proliferation of smart communication devices on the plant floor (such as meters, controlers, and so on), stronger coupling between previously autonomous processes is now possible. Many think this represents the next wave of e-business, and when we examine the resources that numerous companies are investing in such tech- nologies, we can see that the stakes are substantial. Indeed, linking business and opera- tional processes stands to profoundly change the way application software sup- ports business activities along several dimensions. First, it will dramatically speed up decision-making by providing executives and decision-making software with accurate, up-to-date, and appropri- ately formatted information. Second, it will allow faster response to changes — flexibility is crucial in markets that are moving from mass production to more customized approaches in which business- es must implement decisions quicker than ever. Third, organizations will be able to significantly improve capital-asset man- agement and maintenance optimization. Finally, it will spur the creation of innova- tive e-services based on data regularly col- lected on manufacturing plant floors. 56 JANUARY • FEBRUARY 2006 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1089-7801/06/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING Asynchronous Middleware and Services