An Erroneous Behavior Taxonomy for Operation and Maintenance of Network Systems.

This paper presents an erroneous behavior taxonomy for network operation and maintenance in the sector of information and communications technology. In this study, through analysis of the procedures of six typical tasks, a generic task type description was first proposed to represent task steps, with three component attributes including operators, objects, and functions. Based on that, four domain experts were invited to make judgments on potential erroneous behaviors when technicians carried out such tasks. Judgment results were analyzed and grouped into a three-level error taxonomy including 10 Level 1 error modes (failures of macro-cognitive functions), 38 Level 2 error modes (general forms of observable erroneous behaviors), and 75 instanced error modes (specific observable erroneous behaviors in specific task steps). The error taxonomy exhibits unique characteristics of the sector of information and communications technology compared with traditional safety-critical domains. Moreover, meaningful insights are gained from this study, including the strength of this three-attribute task type description and the existence of requirements on human understanding in action-type tasks.