Abstract
A workflow can remain unfinished after the effects relevant to one downstream decision have become bounded. Formal methods can test stability over a stated set of futures; a live system must also justify that set for use by another machine. Reliance Before Closure specifies this evidence-to-reliance handoff. Provider-specific qualification uses operational evidence and explicit assumptions to establish a claim-relative future boundary under a named trust profile. For the frozen scalar-threshold profile, the resulting certificate carries a stability margin, while a proposed action is separately bounded by its possible movement toward the verdict's flip boundary. A provider-blind relying function then checks semantic identity and margin preservation, with unknown unbounded paths failing closed. Kubernetes commissioning exercised mutation control, action qualification, concurrency, and controller timing. An initial mechanism remained REVIEW. In a later trust-scoped execution, the relying function returned SUPPORTED before the subsequent Pod creation succeeded and before broader Deployment closure. The archived evidence and offline verifier reconstruct the boundary, margin, action bound, relying decision, commit evidence, and closure. The result is a narrow existence claim: claim-relative machine reliance can precede workflow-wide closure when the relevant future boundary and proposed action are qualified under the same evidence and trust bindings.
Research artifacts
The Technical Note documents the evidence-qualified reliance model and commissioning result. Reliance Inspector v0.4.0 is a separate frozen software release for inspecting the semantic model, recorded evidence bundles, and offline verification path.
- Technical Note
- Full-text PDF
- Software
- Reliance Inspector v0.4.0 · Zenodo software archive
Scope and record relationship
The Zenodo Technical Note record is the persistent archival record for this publication. The RISU-hosted PDF is an institutional full-text mirror of that record, not a new edition.
The Reliance Inspector v0.4.0 software record is a separate archived research artifact.
Citation
Moon Lee, “Reliance Before Closure: Evidence-Qualified Stability for Machine Decisions Under Unresolved Effects,” RISU Technical Note 2026-02, RISU Institute, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22038494
- Technical Note DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22038494
- Software DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22037607