What question did this study set out to answer?

This work aims to present a framework for governance in decision-making systems that handles authorization failures.

March 26, 2026Open Access

Failure-Aware Multimodel Decision Architecture (FA-MDA)

Key Points

This work aims to present a framework for governance in decision-making systems that handles authorization failures.
Inductive development from operational experience with ContextOS.
Formalization of recurring failure patterns into design features.
Specification of SCALE control-plane for decision routing and drift detection.
Implementation aligned with EU AI Act requirements.
Authorization failure was defined as an architectural rather than an alignment issue.
Refusal and escalation were established as key design components.
SCALE control-plane enables effective routing and arbitration.

Abstract

FA-MDA (Failure-Aware Multimodel Decision Architecture) is a governance framework for LLM orchestration systems addressing authorization failure: the failure mode where locally coherent generation produces globally illegitimate action. FA-MDA emerged inductively from operational experience building ContextOS — a SSOT-based knowledge governance system with SHA256-verified artifacts, append-only logs, and HARD/SOFT/FLOAT priority enforcement. The architectural principles were first observed as recurring failure patterns before being formalized. Core contributions: (1) formalization of authorization failure as an architectural problem, not an alignment problem; (2) refusal and escalation as first-class design features; (3) the SCALE control-plane specification for routing, arbitration, drift detection, and escalation packaging; (4) an evidence-grade audit framework aligned with EU AI Act Art. 9, 12, 14 requirements.

Failure-Aware Multimodel Decision Architecture (FA-MDA)

Key Points

Abstract

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