This book contains 14 invited contributions written by distinguished authors who participated in the VIII International Conference on Computational Plasticity held at CIMNE/UPC (www.cimne.com) from 5-8 September 2005, Barcelona, Spain. The meeting was one of the Thematic Conferences of the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS, www.eccomas.org).

The different chapters of this book present recent progress and future research directions in the field of computational plasticity. A common line of many contributions is that a stronger interaction between the phenomenological and micromechanical modelling of plasticity behaviour is apparent and the use of inverse identification techniques is also more prominent. The development of adaptive strategies for plasticity problems continues to be a challenging goal, while it is interesting to note the permanence of element modelling as a research issue. Industrial forming processes, geomechanics, steel and concrete structures form the core of the applications of the different numerical methods presented in the book.