This work brings together research in three important and related fields: formal methods; distributed systems; and object-based technology. Such a convergence is representative of advances in the field of distributed systems, and provides links between several scientific and technological communities. The wide scope of topics covered in this volume range in subject from UML to object-based languages and calculi and security, and in approach from specification to case studies and verification. The book comprises the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems (FMOODS 2002), which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Enschede, The Netherlands in March 2002.