Governability Metrics for Autonomous Systems: Toward the Measurement of Runtime Governability

As autonomous systems become increasingly capable, adaptive, and operationally distributed, questions of governability become increasingly important. While existing research has focused heavily on performance, safety, reliability, explainability, and compliance, comparatively little attention has been devoted to a fundamental practical challenge: how governability can be assessed and measured. This paper introduces a conceptual framework for governability metrics in autonomous systems. It argues that governability should be treated as a measurable higher-order system property rather than as a binary compliance condition. The paper proposes a multi-level assessment structure spanning system governability, fleet governability, organizational governability, and ecosystem governability, and introduces eight core governability dimensions: observability, controllability, intervenability, accountability, recoverability, certification continuity, governance reachability, and governance persistence. Building on these dimensions, the paper develops a layered framework linking governability dimensions, indicators, measurements, scoring approaches, maturity models, and assessment mechanisms. The objective is not to propose a specific implementation, control architecture, or proprietary measurement protocol, but to establish a conceptual foundation for future governability assessment, assurance, benchmarking, certification, and policy development. The paper further explores governability scoring, governability maturity levels, practical applications, limitations, and a future research agenda for the emerging field of governability measurement. It argues that governability cannot mature into an engineering discipline, assurance discipline, certification discipline, or infrastructure discipline unless it becomes measurable. The central thesis is straightforward: what cannot be measured cannot be reliably governed. As autonomous systems increasingly become critical infrastructure, governability metrics may become essential for determining whether such systems can remain observable, controllable, accountable, certifiable, and governable at scale.