Exceptions are considered to be unusual states that can but must not be taken primarily into account. They form exclusions, represent cases to which a rule does not apply, form specific states that are not going to be handled at least by the current system, or might represent legal objections against the typical state. Exceptions are currently considered to be a sign of poor culture, wrong implementation, bugs in the code, bad understanding of the application domain area, wrong deployment of technology, or poor education of people. This understanding is completely different from the understanding and treatment of exceptions in real life.

In our projects we discovered that exceptions must not be neglected in such a way. Architectures can be made more flexible to cope with exceptions. This paper thus aims in extending architectures of modern software and information systems in such a way that these systems are exception-aware and provide a management of exceptions in a coherent form.