Book excerpt: This PSTV'94 Symposium is the fourteenth of a series of annual meetings organized under the auspices of IFIP W.G. 6.1, a Working Group dedicated to "Architectures and Protocols for Computer Networks". This is the oldest and most established symposium in the emerging field of protocol engineering which has spawn many international conferences including FORTE (International Conference on Formal Description Tech niques), IWPTS (International Workshop on Protocol Test Systems), ICNP (Interna tional Conference on Network Protocols) and CAY (Conference on Computer-Aided Verification). The main objective of this PSTV symposium is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners in industry and academia interested in advances in using formal methods and methodologies to specify, develop, test and verify communication protocols and distributed systems. This year's PSTV symposium enjoys a nice mixture of formal methods and practical issues in network protocols through the invited addresses of three outstanding speakers, Ed Brinksma (University of Twente), Raj Jain (Ohio State University) and David Tennenhouse (MIT) as well as 5 tutorials, in addition to 9 techni cal sessions and two practical panel sessions. The 5 tutorials are offered on the first day in two parallel tracks for intensive exposure on hot topics of current interest. This year, out of 51 submissions the Program Committee selected 18 regular papers (with an allotment of 16 pages in the Proceedings) and 9 mini-papers (of 8 pages).