Preface This three-volume booklet contains the papers presented at CS&P ’08, the 17 th International Conference on Concurrency, Specification and Programming. CS&P ’08 is held on Groß Väter See near Berlin, Germany, from 29 th September to 1 st October 2008. The CS&P series has been established under this name in 1992; it emerged from a cooperation between Humboldt University Berlin and Warsaw University which dates back to the mid-1970’s. It is being organised in turn by the computer science departments of both universities. What’s more, the interest in CS&P is steadily growing beyond the range of fields of interest. Presently, there are 105 authors from 13 countries: Poland, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Egypt, United Kingdom, Vietnam, China, India, Sweden, Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria. Following its tradition, the meeting nevertheless tries to retain an informal working atmosphere. Therefore, the call for papers welcomed drafts and extended abstracts as well as fully elaborated contributions. The accepted 53 papers were revised according to the referee’s suggestions and are now published in the proceedings at hand as well as on the workshop web site (www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/ki/CSP2008). Additionally, it is planned that selected articles from CS&P ’08 will appear in a special issue of the journal “Fundamenta Informaticae”. Due to the history of the workshop, this year’s contributions focus on Petri net theory, autonomous agents and robots, applications of Artificial Intelligence, logic and model theory, model-based design and verification, security issues, programming languages, rough sets and other mathematical structures, and the theory of approximation spaces and information systems. However, CS&P ’08 will be memorised by the participants not only for the remarkable scientific program: It takes place in a small village near Berlin into the famous forest and hunting area “Schorfheide”. This is one of Germany’s largest forestal areas, with an exceptional landscape, rare wildlife and recreational possibilities. Let’s look forward to an exciting scientific and social event! Berlin, September 2008 Hans-Dieter Burkhard Gabriela Lindemann Holger Schlingloff Acknowledgements (1) The CS&P conference series is being supported by mutual research exchange programs between Germany and Poland. CS&P ’08 gratefully acknowledges the support of DAAD, the German academic exchange service. (2) The organisation of the submission, refereeing and publication process was greatly facilitated by the EasyChair conference management system (www.easychair.org); the organisers would like to thank Andrei Voronkov and his team for this wonderful software.