Taxonomy for Human Error and System Fault Recovery from the Engineering Perspective

This paper deals with human error resistance. In the first part of it, a short state-of-the-art of human error resistance, i.e. error prevention and error handling is presented. Then, error handling, which is usually divided into four sequential tasks – error detection and explanation, recovery planning and execution – is described. The second part of this paper put emphasis on error recovery, which is our main object of study. First and foremost, through an example, we can see what makes the distinction between forward and backward error recovery in current taxonomy. Then the limits of this distinction are going to be highlighted. In the third part of this paper we propose and illustrate, from the engineering perspective, our own taxonomy of error recovery suitable for real-world and dynamic systems