Safety-Bounded Autonomy: A Systems Architecture for Distributed Autonomous Systems

This paper introduces Safety-Bounded Autonomy as the architectural safety layer within a broader governance framework for autonomous systems. It positions safety not as a behavioral outcome, but as an intrinsic system property enforced through architecture. The proposed framework ensures that system behavior remains within predefined and enforceable safety boundaries, even under adaptive and learning conditions. Related works: A Governance Architecture for Safe and Bounded Autonomous Systems (core architecture) Non-Bypassable Execution Control in Autonomous Systems (execution layer) Capability Lifecycle Governance in Autonomous Systems (capability layer) Autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in complex and safety-critical environments, including industrial automation, autonomous transportation networks, distributed drone fleets, and logistics infrastructures. As these systems scale in autonomy and interconnection, ensuring reliable and system-wide safety guarantees becomes a fundamental engineering challenge. Safety-Bounded Autonomy introduces an architecture-level approach in which safety constraints are enforced through system structure. Rather than relying on decision-policy correctness or post-hoc validation, candidate actions generated by decision-making components are subject to architecture-level validation mechanisms prior to execution. The framework builds on capability-gated autonomy: decision-making components generate candidate actions, while execution is conditioned on compliance with predefined safety contracts and system constraints. This ensures that only admissible actions can be executed within bounded operational envelopes. This approach is particularly relevant for distributed multi-agent systems, where locally safe decisions may interact to produce globally unsafe outcomes. By enforcing safety constraints at the architectural level, the framework enables coordinated, system-wide safety enforcement across heterogeneous and distributed environments. This paper provides a conceptual systems architecture for scalable and verifiable safety in autonomous systems and complements related work on governance architectures, execution control, and capability-based autonomy. This work is part of a broader research program on governance and execution control in autonomous systems, including capability governance, safety-bounded autonomy, and non-bypassable execution control architectures.