It is our pleasure to present the papers accepted and presented at the 5th Int- national School and Symposium on Advanced Distributed Systems (ISSADS) in this LNCS volume. The symposium was held in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico from January 24 to 28, 2005. The organization team was composed of members of CINVESTAV Guadalajara, Rostock University in Germany, the CUCEI and CUCEA campuses of Guadalajara University, and Instituto Tecnol ogico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente, ITESO. The symposium is already a we- established annual meeting, at which scientists and people from the industrial ?eld meet and discuss the progress of applications and the theory of distributed systems in a forum during the last week of January. This year, more than 250 people from 3 continents attended the conference. Most of them are scientists, teachers, students and engineers from the local industry. The papers presented in the sessions of the symposium cover not only the subjects of distributed systems from the system level and applications, but also contributions from the area of theory and arti?cial intelligence concepts. These papers were selected out of more than 100 submissions. There was a selection ?lter in which each paper was evaluated by at least three members of the - ternational Program Committee, who came from research institutions of good reputation all over the world."

This volume contains the accepted papers from the 3rd International School andSymposium onAdvanced Distributed Systems heldin Guadalajara, Mexico, January24-30,2004.Thiseventwasorganizedbytheteamsmadeupofmembers of CINVESTAV Guadalajara, CUCEI, the Computer Science Department of the Centre of Research and Advances Studies at the CUCEA campus of the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, the University of Rostock, Germany and ITESO, Guadalajara. The ISSADS symposium provides a forum for scientists and people from industry to discuss the progress of applications and theory of distributedsystems.Thisyeartherewereover300participantsfrom3continents, among which about 20 percent came from industry. Theconferenceprogramconsistedof25acceptedpapersoutof46submissions and covered several aspects of distributed systems from hardware and system level up to di?erent applications. These papers were selected by a peer review process, in which each paper was evaluated by at least three members of the international program committee. Inaddition, thethreeinvitedspeakers, AdolfoGuzmanArenas, YakupParker and Joaquin Vila, presented interesting overviews to current development and research directions in distributed systems. Furthermore, eight tutorials and four industrial forums from IBM, INTEL, HP and SUN enabled the participants to extend their knowledge in selected areas. A panel, which was organized by a team composed of researchersfrom the Universidadde Guadalajaraand focused on tra?c control and simulation, also demonstrated the practical application of recent research in distributed systems to the problems of Guadalaj