META-CONTROL: Stability and Reversibility in Safety-Critical Adaptive Systems Under Extreme Operational Load

Founder Theory Paper (Normative Framework Definition) This document defines a foundational, normative framework for meta-control in safety-critical adaptive systems operating under extreme operational load. It formalizes the governance of regime transitions, saturation behavior, buffering, survivability, and reversibility, addressing failure modes that emerge when control and adaptation become destabilizing. The framework is intentionally non-procedural. It provides no algorithms, implementations, parameterizations, or domain-specific instantiations. Its purpose is to define the problem space, operational boundaries, and governing invariants required to preserve system coherence under sustained stress, uncertainty, and conflicting objectives. The operational regime taxonomy defined in this work is closed. No additional regimes are assumed beyond those explicitly specified. Instantiation and implementation are treated as derivative works and are explicitly outside the scope of this document.