Spatial Inference-Time Skill Routing

Mechanism

The spatial inference router sits between the inference dispatcher and the adaptation-artifact pool that holds skills, tool descriptors, retrieval indices, and policy fragments. When a request arrives, the router constructs a spatial-context tuple consisting of: the unit's credentialed location estimate (a position fix carrying signature, freshness, and uncertainty bounds), the zone classification derived from that estimate against a credentialed zone map, the set of peer-unit attestations currently within scope, the environmental observations admitted by the local mesh, and the regulatory-authority overlays applicable to the zone. This tuple is the spatial half of the admissibility input; the consumer's policy and the request descriptor form the non-spatial half.

The router then evaluates each candidate adaptation artifact through a composite admissibility predicate. The predicate combines artifact-side requirements (which authorities must endorse, which zones the artifact is permitted in, which peer attestations are required, what minimum freshness the location estimate must hold) with consumer-side policy (what classes of artifact the consumer admits at this location, which zones the consumer treats as restricted, which peer authorities the consumer trusts). Artifacts that fail any required predicate are excluded from the activation set; artifacts that pass become candidates for the inference call.

Within the surviving candidate set, the router applies a locality-preference rule: artifacts resident on the unit itself, or on a co-located edge node within the same zone, are preferred over artifacts that would require a cross-zone retrieval. Cross-zone retrieval is permitted only when no local artifact satisfies the request, and only when the consumer's policy explicitly authorizes the cross-zone path for the request class. Each cross-zone retrieval is wrapped in a credentialed envelope that names the source zone, the destination zone, the request class, the artifact identity, and the responsible authority; the envelope is admitted by the destination zone's gateway only if the gateway's local policy admits the envelope.

When activation completes, the router emits a routing record into the lineage stream. The record names the request, the spatial-context tuple, the candidate set evaluated, the admissibility outcome for each candidate, the activation decision, the artifacts actually invoked, and the cross-zone envelopes (if any) that were used. The record is signed by the router's credential and chained to the prior routing record by hash, producing a tamper-evident audit log that an authority can replay to reconstruct any inference's spatial context.

Operating Parameters

The spatial-context tuple is parameterized by a freshness bound on the location estimate, expressed in milliseconds since fix and in meters of allowed positional uncertainty. Implementations may set the freshness bound aggressively (single-digit seconds, sub-meter uncertainty) for high-stakes routing in dense zones or loosely (tens of seconds, multi-meter uncertainty) for low-stakes routing in sparse zones. The bound is itself a credentialed parameter; an authority that revises the bound issues a signed update that the router consumes at the next routing event.

Zone classification is parameterized by the credentialed zone map and by an in-zone tolerance margin. The margin handles the boundary case where a unit's estimate places it near a zone boundary; the router resolves the ambiguity by treating the unit as in the more-restrictive zone until additional evidence promotes it. The margin is configurable per consumer and per request class, allowing aggressive operators to accept boundary risk and conservative operators to refuse it.

Peer-attestation admission is parameterized by minimum-quorum thresholds and by attestation-freshness bounds. A skill that requires "two credentialed peers within 50 meters within the last 30 seconds" expresses these parameters in its admissibility descriptor; the router evaluates the descriptor against the current peer set and admits or excludes the skill accordingly. The quorum thresholds are tunable per skill class, enabling skills to express their own evidentiary requirements rather than inheriting a system-wide default.

Cross-zone routing is parameterized by an allow-list of admissible cross-zone paths, by a per-path latency budget, and by a per-path data-class restriction. The allow-list expresses which zone-pairs the consumer permits routing across; the latency budget caps the round-trip cost the consumer will accept before falling back to a local approximation; the data-class restriction limits which classes of payload may traverse the path. A defense consumer may permit cross-zone routing for unclassified queries while refusing it for classified queries; a commercial consumer may permit cross-zone routing for low-latency-tolerant queries while refusing it for real-time-critical queries.

The audit-record stream is parameterized by retention duration, redaction rules, and replication factor. Authorities that require long retention (transportation regulators, defense commands) configure long retention with selective redaction; consumers that require minimal disclosure configure short retention with aggressive redaction; the architecture treats both configurations as first-class parameters rather than as forks of the implementation.

Alternative Embodiments

In a mobile-edge embodiment, the operating unit hosts a complete router instance and a curated artifact pool sized for the unit's expected mission profile. Cross-zone routing falls back to an upstream edge node only when local artifacts cannot satisfy the request; the unit may continue operating during upstream outages by restricting itself to its local artifact pool and recording the degraded mode in lineage.

In a fixed-infrastructure embodiment, the router is hosted on a zone-resident server (a port operations center, a hospital data center, a substation controller) and serves multiple operating units within the zone. The zone server maintains the zone's artifact pool and the zone's policy; operating units consume routing decisions from the zone server while contributing their own peer attestations to the zone's evidence base.

In a federated-mesh embodiment, multiple zone routers cooperate through credentialed gateways. A unit operating across zones consumes routing from whichever zone it currently occupies; cross-zone artifact retrieval flows through the gateway with envelope-level audit. The federation supports cross-jurisdictional operation (a vehicle crossing state lines, a vessel transiting multiple port authorities, a drone operating in joint airspace) without requiring a single central router.

In a privacy-preserving embodiment, the routing decision is made on an encrypted spatial-context tuple using attribute-based encryption or a confidential-computing enclave; the router learns only the admissibility outcome, not the raw position. The audit record names the policy that was evaluated and the outcome, but not the raw coordinate, supporting deployments where positional disclosure is itself sensitive.

In a degraded-connectivity embodiment, the router operates on cached credentials and a stale-but-signed zone map. The router records the staleness in each routing decision and refuses any request that requires fresh credentials beyond the cache horizon. The embodiment supports operation in disconnected environments (subterranean, undersea, electronically denied) where periodic re-credentialing is the operating norm.

Composition

The spatial inference router composes upward with the consumer's policy engine and downward with the adaptation-artifact pool. The policy engine supplies the consumer-side admissibility rules; the artifact pool supplies the artifacts and their admissibility descriptors; the router brokers the two against the spatial-context tuple. The composition is intentionally narrow: the router does not interpret the request semantics, does not modify the artifacts, and does not bypass the policy engine. It is a routing fabric, not a decision engine.

Sideways, the router composes with the personal-layer privilege so that consumer-bound artifacts traverse the same routing fabric while preserving their privileged status; with the authority taxonomy so that authority-class admissibility flows through the same predicate evaluator; and with the lineage substrate so that routing records share the chained audit format used for execution records. A query that traverses retrieval, skill activation, and personal-layer modulation produces a unified lineage in which routing decisions, execution decisions, and modulation decisions are interleaved in temporal order.

Composition with the credentialed update path allows zone maps, policy fragments, peer-attestation requirements, and authority overlays to evolve through governance updates rather than re-deployment. The router consumes signed updates at well-defined synchronization points and records the update version in each routing decision, allowing an authority to identify which version of the policy and zone map governed any historical inference.

Prior-Art Differentiation

Conventional inference-routing architectures route on request semantics (model selection, capability matching, load balancing) without first-class spatial context. Geofencing systems gate user access to applications by location but do not propagate spatial context into the inference admissibility decision; once the user is inside the geofence, the inference behaves identically regardless of fine-grained location. Mobile-edge computing systems prefer local execution for latency reasons but treat the locality preference as a performance optimization rather than as a credentialed admissibility constraint.

The disclosed mechanism differs structurally. Spatial context is not a performance hint; it is an admissibility input that can exclude artifacts entirely. Locality preference is not a latency optimization; it is a default constraint that cross-zone routing must explicitly override under credentialed authorization. Audit is not optional telemetry; it is a required output that produces a chained, signed record for every routing decision. The combination of credentialed spatial context, locality-default routing, explicit cross-zone authorization, and required audit lineage is the operative novelty.

Disclosure Scope

This disclosure covers spatial-context-driven inference routing, including the construction of the spatial-context tuple from credentialed location, zone, peer, environmental, and authority inputs; the locality-default routing rule with credentialed cross-zone override; the evaluation of artifact admissibility against the composite spatial-and-policy predicate; the emission of chained, signed routing records into a lineage substrate; and the embodiments described above. The disclosure extends to systems in which the router is hosted on the operating unit, on zone infrastructure, on a federated mesh, in a privacy-preserving enclave, or in a degraded-connectivity cache. The disclosure further extends to the credentialed-update path that evolves zone maps, policies, peer requirements, and authority overlays without re-deployment, and to the composition of the router with policy engines, personal-layer privilege, authority taxonomies, and lineage substrates as described.

The disclosure further covers any system that combines (a) credentialed spatial context as a first-class admissibility input, (b) locality-default artifact preference with explicit cross-zone authorization, (c) chained signed routing records, and (d) credentialed governance of the spatial-context parameters themselves, irrespective of the specific cryptographic primitives, the specific zone-map representation, the specific peer-attestation schema, or the specific lineage-substrate encoding used to instantiate the four elements. Variations in implementation detail — the choice of signature algorithm, the choice of ledger versus log for the lineage substrate, the choice of polygonal versus cell-based zone representation, the choice of unicast versus broadcast peer attestation transport — are within the disclosure's scope so long as the four-element combination is preserved. Embodiments that omit any of the four elements, or that admit cross-zone routing without credentialed authorization, or that emit routing decisions without chained audit, fall outside the disclosed mechanism even if they share surface features with the disclosed embodiments.