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adr-finite-state-governance-engine

Decision

Adopt and promote the Finite-State Governance Action Engine pattern as an authoritative architectural standard across the platform.

Context

  • Source: governance-flow
  • Pattern: finite-state-governance-engine
  • Promotion Recommendation: recommendation-finite-state-governance-engine
  • Scope Classification: global
  • Scope Classification Artifact: pattern-scope-classification

Autonomous agent executions require verifiable state machine constraints to prevent unauthorized entity lifecycle transitions and bypass of compliance checks.

Scope

Applicability: Applies globally across all autonomous runner workflows, agentic mutations, and entity lifecycle progressions within CAS.

Global architectural guardrail enforcing state-transition integrity across all continuous architecture components.

Consequences

Governance

Guarantees formal lifecycle progression auditability and prevents illegal promotion transitions by autonomous processes.

Execution

Enforces pre-transition checks via TransitionRegistry before applying any mutative governance action.

System Behaviour

Rejects invalid transition attempts deterministically with explicit GovernanceException errors.

Evidence Summary

Promotion Evidence

Production implementation in src/cas_runner/governance/governance_action_engine.py with TransitionRegistry and GovernanceActionEngine, supported by GovernanceAction contracts.

Promotion Criteria

Satisfies significance, reusability, recurrence, evidence quality, governance maturity, and strategic alignment criteria.

Governance Risks

Overly restrictive transition policies may impede emergent experimentation workflows if intermediate states are unregistered.

Traceability

Pattern Proposal

finite-state-governance-engine

Scope Classification

Artifact: pattern-scope-classification

Classification: global

Promotion Recommendation

recommendation-finite-state-governance-engine

Promotion Decision

promotion-decision-finite-state-governance-engine

Next Step

  • Submit ADR to Architecture Forum for formal institutionalisation
  • Generate global pattern record in knowledge/global/patterns/