This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory, SWAT 2002, held in Turku, Finland, in July 2002.The 43 revised full papers presented together with two invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 103 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on scheduling, computational geometry, graph algorithms, robotics, approximation algorithms, data communication, computational biology, and data storage and manipulation.