Abstract— There are many applications where a timely response to an important event is needed. Often such response can require significant computation and possibly communication, and it can be very challenging to complete it within the time-frame the response is needed. At the same time, there could be applicationspecific flexibility in the computation that may be desired. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a middleware that can support such applications. Each of the services in our target applications could have one or more service parameters, which can be modified, within the pre-specified ranges, by the middleware. The middleware enables the timecritical event handling to achieve the maximum benefit, as per the user-defined benefit function, while satisfying the time constraint. Our middleware is also based on the existing Grid infrastructure and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) concepts. We have evaluated our middleware and its support fo...