The last decade has seen a significantly increased interest in the computational mechanics and numerical analysis communities in expanding classical discretization methods like finite element methods to more general approaches.

The two main themes in these developments are:

• Simplified and generalized methods for discretization of the
  computational domain

• Accounting for special features of the solution directly in the
  approximation space

These efforts have been very successful and a vast variety of new ideas have been introduced and consolidated in new methods, theories, and applications. Important developments include partition of unity methods, meshfree methods, extended finite element methods, fictitious domain methods, and cut finite element methods.

The X-DMS 2017 conference will in particular address recent developments in

• Discretization of complex and evolving geometries

• Software packages that support extended discretization
  methods

X-DMS 2017 is the second X-DMS conference continuing the previous and successful X-FEM conference cycle and aims at covering a wide variety of methods coming from different areas of computational mechanics and numerical analysis. The X-DMS 2017 conference gathers all scientists working on these approaches and provides an arena for presentation of recent state of the art research contributions, exchange of ideas between different approaches, and to identify and discuss promising new research directions.