Fault origin adjudication

When a program P fails to satisfy a requirement R supposedly ensured by a detailed specification S that was used to implement P, there is a question about whether the problem arises in S or in P. We call this determination fault origin adjudication and illustrate its significance in various software engineering contexts. The primary contribution of this paper is a framework for formal fault origin adjudication for network protocols using the NS simulator and the SPIN model checker. We describe our architecture and illustrate its use in a case study involving a standard specification for packet radio routing.