Execution Governance: A Control-Plane Architecture for Mediating Actions of Adaptive Systems

This record provides an open-access preprint of the manuscript, "Execution Governance: A Control-Plane Architecture for Mediating Actions of Adaptive Systems."The paper introduces execution governance as a control-plane architecture that separates adaptive decision generation from execution authority. Rather than governing internal model reasoning, the architecture mediates candidate actions at governed execution interfaces before those actions may produce external system effects.Candidate actions are evaluated against constraint-defined admissible regions, and execution is permitted only when authorization conditions are satisfied. The paper establishes a confinement property showing that executed behavior remains within the admissible region defined by active governance constraints, independent of the internal reasoning process that generated the candidate actions.The architecture extends classical reference monitor and complete mediation principles to settings in which actions originate from adaptive computational processes rather than human operators, and draws on supervisory control theory to formalize admissibility constraints on executed behavior.The result is an implementation-neutral control-plane pattern applicable across heterogeneous operational infrastructure.