Page 12 -

Acknowledgements xi

Ligt, Zheng Liu, Niels Lohmann, Peter Hornix, Fabrizio Maggi, Jan Mendling,
Frits Minderhoud, Arnold Moleman, Marco Montali, Michael zur Muehlen, Jorge
Munoz-Gama, Mariska Netjes, Andriy Nikolov, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Carlos Pedri-
naci, Viara Popova, Silvana Quaglini, Manfred Reichert, Hajo Reijers, Remmert
Remmerts de Vries, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, Marcello La Rosa, Michael Rosemann,
Vladimir Rubin, Stefania Rusu, Eduardo Portela Santos, Natalia Sidorova, Alessan-
dro Sperduti, Christian Stahl, Keith Swenson, Nikola Trcka, Kenny van Uden, Irene
Vanderfeesten, George Varvaressos, Marc Verdonk, Sicco Verwer, Jan Vogelaar,
Hans Vrins, Jianmin Wang, Teun Wagemakers, Barbara Weber, Lijie Wen, Jan Mar-
tijn van der Werf, Mathias Weske, Michael Westergaard, Moe Wynn, Bart Ydo, and
Marco Zapletal for their support. Thanks to all that read earlier drafts of this book
(special thanks go to Christian, Eric, and Ton for their detailed comments).
Thanks to Springer-Verlag for publishing this book. Ralf Gerstner encouraged
me to write this book and handled things in a truly excellent manner. Thanks Ralf!
More than 95% of book was written in beautiful Schleiden. Despite my sabbat-
ical, there were many other tasks competing for attention. Thanks to my weekly
visits to Schleiden (without Internet access!), it was possible to write this book in a
three month period. The excellent coffee of Serafin helped when proofreading the
individual chapters, the scenery did the rest.
As always, acknowledgements end with thanking the people most precious.
Lion’s share of credits should go to Karin, Anne, Willem, Sjaak, and Loes. They
often had to manage without me under difficult circumstances. Without their con-
tinuing support, this book would have taken ages.

Schleiden, Germany Wil M.P. van der Aalst
December 2010