Introductory paper

This special section is devoted to a selection of contributions originally presented at the 1st International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Model Checking (PDMC 2002), which took place in Brno, Czech Republic in September 2002 as a satellite event of the 13th conference on concurrency theory (CONCUR 2002). The growing importance of automated formal verification in industry is driving a growing interest in those aspects that have a direct impact on its applicability to real-world problems. One of the main technical challenges is in devising tools that allow one to handle large state spaces. In the last several years numerous approaches to solving this problem have been developed. Recently there has been increasing interest in parallelizing and distributing verification techniques. Papers that appear in this special section provide an interesting sampling of typical approaches in this direction.