The growth in Internet and Information Technology (IT) has led to revolutionary changes in the way businesses are managed and operated. These IT changes have been largely characterized with the term, globalization, and these globalized changes in modern business are increasing at a rapid pace. Moreover, globalization requires rapid growth and dramatic changes in the business and market environments.

Enterprises must be scalable to support such changes and unprecedented growth. Hence, there is an immediate need for a single reference book that identifies the multiple dimensions of scalability and enterprise systems. This book will fulfill this need. Its objectives are as follows:
*To create a single source of literature to address the emerging area of scalable enterprise systems.
*To address the multi-disciplinary research needs stemming from engineering, computer science and business.
*To address the design, modelling, analysis, implementation and experimentation needs of scalable enterprise systems.
*To act as a springboard for much of the ongoing research in the field of Scalable Enterprise Systems.

Scalable Enterprises Systems: An Introduction to Recent Advances addresses six key ideas related to scalable enterprise systems. Chapters 1, 2 and 3 address the modelling aspects of enterprise systems. Chapter 4 discusses distributed control of such systems. Chapter 5 discusses the information systems modelling and implementation of the enterprise system with a transportation example. Given that enterprise systems produce and deal with large volumes of data, data mining is taken as a topic in Chapter 6. The need for a research test-bed is critical to study andanalyze enterprise systems and this is the topic of Chapter 7. Implementation level details play a vital role in studying the scalability of large-scale systems. Chapters 8, 9 and 10 deal with several applied and implementation aspects, such as publish-subscribe middleware, auctions in the context of reverse logistics, and value net implementation.

This book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in the field of logistics, supply chain management, transportation, and enterprise integration. It will be of special interest to professionals in IT at the detailed implementation level and at the strategic level.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is the leading sponsor of basic academic research in engineering, and its influence far exceeds its budget. We think NSF is at its best when it uses that influence to focus interest within the researcher community on critical new challenges and technologies. NSF's Scalable Enterprise Systems (SES) initiative, for which we were responsible in our successive terms in the division of Design, Manufacture and Industrial Innovation (DMII), was just such a venture. A collaborative effort spanning NSF's engineering and computer science directorates, SES sought to concentrate the energies of the academic engineering research community on developing a science base for designing, planning and controlling the extended, spatially and managerially distributed enterprises that have become the norm in the manufacture, distribution and sale of the products of U. S. industry. The of associated issues addressed included everything from management supply chains, to product design across teams of collaborating companies, to e-marketing and make-to-order manufacturing, to the information technology challenges of devising inter-operable planning and control tools that can scale with exploding enterprise size and scope. A total of 27 teams with nearly 100 investigators were selected from the 89 submitted proposals in the Phase I, exploratory part of the effort (see the list below). Seven of these were awarded larger multi-year grants to continue their research in Phase II. As the contents of this book amply illustrate, these investigations continue to flourish, with and without direct NSF support.