SAFE-Matter™ Trust Engine — The Evaluation Layer of the Evidential Safety Governance System

The SAFE-Matter™ Trust Engine defines the deterministic evaluation layer of the SAFE-Matter evidential safety governance system.Operating on SM Codes™, the Trust Engine evaluates the operational condition of life-critical safety functions at the moment of reliance. It transforms attributable, valid, and temporally relevant evidence into a Trust Score representing the current evidential state of a defined safety function.Unlike traditional certification models, which infer safety from historical compliance, the Trust Engine determines whether a system can be relied upon based on present evidence. Where evidence is absent, degraded, or expired, this is reflected directly in the resulting state without substitution or assumption.The Trust Engine forms the core evaluation mechanism within SAFE-Matter, positioned between the identity layer (SM Codes) and the enforcement layer (Trust Reflex). It enables deterministic, non-discretionary assessment of operational condition and establishes a defensible basis for reliance in life-critical environments.This document forms part of the SAFE-Matter system architecture corpus.