Software Engineering Institute

The problem of how to best classify system errors has been a topic of research for years. In this paper, we present an established taxonomy that draws on a broad range of previous work in this area: the Architecture Analysis and Design Language’s (AADL) EMV2 Error Library. The error library is now part of an international standard and has been used in a range of systems and domains. In this work, we describe its features, including that (a) it is deeply integrated in a rich, semi-formal system modeling language (AADL); (b) the errors it includes have formalized semantics; and (c) it is designed to be easily extensible by system developers to become domain- or system-specific. We describe the original inspirations and prior work that informed the library’s design, document the error families that comprise the taxonomy, and discuss the library’s usage in an architecturally integrated system assurance process.