The contributions to this volume provide new experiences inhydrocarbon exploration, especially to basin analysismethods and risk assessment by computer modelling. Coveringmainly the North Sea and adjacent areas also examples fromParis basin, off-Southern Italy, Pannonian basin, Bulgaria,Turkey, Russian platform and Baltic Sea are presented. Newapproaches in risk-weighting are performed by Monte Carlosimulations, by application of expert-system technology butalso by taking into account the importance of man-mademechanical effects, resulting from stress-sensitivitymeasurements from log and core data.