This paper presents an asynchronous integration scheme with local time stepping for transport problems. The concept consists in associating refresh time tags to the interface fluxes between cells and to the source terms within the cells rather than to the cell themselves. This scheme is less diffusive numerically than its synchronous equivalent. This method is very effective in terms of computation time for problems with localized sharp minima in the CFL condition. The method is then applied to dielectric barrier discharges for aerodynamic flow control. Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved