Concepts · 3 of 7

Composing cases

A case opens child cases at run time, and their outcomes become evidence in the parent.

Decision record 0081, with each status checked against Canon and engineering protocols code

Work that one case cannot hold opens further cases. An audit opens one change per finding; an epic opens one change per story; an incident opens an investigation and, once the cause is known, a remediation change. The parent's conclusion depends on how its children end.

Engineering protocols express this with two primitives Canon will provide (decision record 0081): an action that opens a child case, and an evidence kind that carries a child's terminal outcome back to the parent. Execution strategy (scheduling, retries) stays outside the protocol.

• Decided3
• Planned3

Decided · recorded, not built

• Decidedcase.open(protocol, subject)An action that opens a child case; its authority is declared by the parent protocol. Not in Canon protocol/1 yet.
• Decidedcase_outcome evidenceA child's terminal outcome is evidence for a parent claim. Not in Canon protocol/1 yet.
• DecidedParent–child links stored by AEPThe planning view becomes a rendering of the case graph.

Planned · roadmap only

• PlannedFan-out with for_eachDesign proposal; no decision record yet.
• PlannedFan-in quantifiers every / some / noneDesign proposal; no decision record yet.
• PlannedCancellation with parent.closedDesign proposal.

1. Parentcase.open

   An action of the parent protocol opens one child case per item.

2. Childrentheir own protocol

   Each child runs under its own protocol and its own commission.

3. Evidencecase_outcome

   Each terminal outcome returns to the parent as evidence.

4. Fan-inevery / some / none

   A parent claim quantifies over the children; UNKNOWN while any is open.

Opening children: fan-out

The number of children is often known only at run time: an audit finds seven issues, an epic has twelve stories. The children come from evidence the parent already holds. In the proposed syntax, for_each makes an action admissible once per evidence record that has no child yet, so the frontier lists concrete instances, remediation.open[finding-3], remediation.open[finding-5], and each one is checked on its own.

proposed syntax, not in Canon protocol/1

evidence_kinds:
  finding:
    description: One issue the audit found; carries a subject (repository, path, revision).
actions:
  remediation.open:
    for_each: {evidence: finding}        # one admissible instance per finding not yet opened
    opens:
      protocol: software.change
      subject: finding.subject
    requires:
      - capability: case.open

Because case.open needs a capability, a composition policy can cap how many children one case may open, instead of a protocol hard-coding a number.

Deciding on the children: fan-in

A parent claim quantifies over the children opened by one action, by outcome:

proposed syntax, not in Canon protocol/1

claims:
  findings.resolved:
    true_when:
      children:
        protocol: software.change
        opened_by: remediation.open
        every:
          outcome: [accepted, declined]

The quantifiers are three-valued, like every Canon claim:

Quantifier	TRUE when	FALSE when	UNKNOWN when
every	every child is closed with a matching outcome	some child is closed with a non-matching outcome	no mismatch yet, but some child is still open
some	some child is closed with a matching outcome	every child is closed and none matches	no match yet, but some child is still open
none	every child is closed and none matches	some child is closed with a matching outcome	no match yet, but some child is still open

With no children opened, every and none are TRUE and some is FALSE; a protocol that needs at least one child says so with a separate claim. UNKNOWN while any child is open is what makes the parent wait, without a scheduler and without a state machine.

Cancellation and failure

Situation	Proposed rule
A child ends abandoned	It counts as a non-matching outcome, so an every claim becomes FALSE. The parent protocol decides whether that blocks it or whether it may open a replacement.
The parent reaches a terminal outcome while children are open	Each open child receives a parent.closed evidence record, and its own protocol declares what that means; for most, outcome abandoned.
The parent is abandoned	The same. No child is left running silently.

Still open: whether several commissions may work one case at once, how cycles are prevented (a case must not open an ancestor), and whether a child may read its parent's evidence.

Three shapes

assessment.audit/1
  action    review.dimension  → evidence finding (0..n)
  action    remediation.open  for_each finding → software.change/1
  claim     findings.resolved every child outcome in [accepted, declined]
  outcome   remediated        assessed + findings.resolved

delivery.wave/1
  action    story.open        for_each story_selected → software.change/1
  claim     stories.done      every child outcome in [accepted, declined]
  action    integration.merge precondition stories.done, needs repository.merge

incident.response/1
  action    investigation.open → investigation (one child)
  action    remediation.open   → software.change/1 (one child, after cause.identified)

The shipped incident.response/1 does not open children yet; these lines show where it would.