Obligation Closure Constraint (OCC): Formal Specification and Falsification Protocol

This document presents the Obligation Closure Constraint (OCC) as a formal specification and test protocol for consequence-bearing systems where outcomes depend on accountable human decisions under credible challenge. It defines a minimal measurement grammar that separates work that merely appears "closed" from durable settlement (work that stays closed over a declared horizon), and it treats displacement—work pushed into downstream queues, shadow channels, or onto users—as an explicit accounting state rather than hidden residual. The specification formalizes a finite verification-and-closure channel: a limited capacity to reduce uncertainty to a declared fidelity standard, make defensible determinations, and settle obligations despite drift from changing rules, interfaces, or adversaries. When demand persistently exceeds this capacity, the excess cannot vanish; it must surface as measurable signatures such as reopenings/return-work, tail thickening and delay growth, displacement, and degraded auditability/actuation, with possible hysteresis after saturation. The document provides an empirical charter: what must be instrumented before claims are permitted, how to avoid circular or contaminated metrics, how to condition results on contestability and reopen channels, what causal claims are allowed at each evidence tier, and what observations would count against the OCC. The aim is audit-ready diagnosis and adversarial testing that prevents boundary drift, proxy substitution, or post-hoc redefinition of success. Empirical Validation: Three Tier-1 deployments have been executed using this protocol, demonstrating its ability to discriminate between sustainable and overloaded regimes: Washington, DC FOIA Request Processing (2020–2025) — Regime diagnosis: Busy but stuck. DCR ≈ 0.88, unresolved stock grew from ~1 to >3,360 cases. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18073749 Philadelphia L&I Appeals Processing (2010–2018) — Regime diagnosis: Busy but stuck. DCR ≈ 0.92, unresolved stock grew from 202 to 1,983 cases. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18076572 City of Vancouver Building Permits (2018–2025) — Regime diagnosis: Sustainable. DCR ≈ 1.04, unresolved stock declined from 494 to zero. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18077993 These deployments confirm the protocol's core discriminative capacity: identical methodology applied to different administrative boundaries produces divergent regime classifications that match observed stock dynamics.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.