A Reference Architecture for Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems

The Architecture of Practical Wisdom presents a non-executable reference architecture for epistemic governance in safety-critical cyber-physical systems. The work defines invariant constraints, governance primitives, and architectural boundaries for constrained autonomy under irreversibility and uncertainty. The volume establishes prior art and a shared conceptual language for systems that must reason about their own uncertainty while remaining fail-closed by design. All implementation-specific details are deliberately omitted; the contribution is architectural and definitional rather than operational. The text integrates concepts from control theory, epistemic modeling, and governance to articulate how ethical constraints can be treated as first-order structural invariants rather than external policy. It is intended as a foundational reference for researchers, engineers, and institutions working with safety-critical autonomous and cyber-physical systems.