State and Persistence

Lab state records the changing contract between scientific intent and physical work. Plans, readiness, handoffs, observations, reviews, and promotion decisions remain distinct durable records linked by stable identifiers.

flowchart LR
    A[Advisory plan] --> X[Executable plan]
    X --> R[Readiness report]
    R --> H[Handoff artifacts]
    H --> O[Observation records]
    O --> F[Failure triage and feedback]
    O --> P[Promotion decision]
    P --> N[Normalized evidence input]
    A --> L[Lifecycle audit]
    X --> L
    R --> L
    P --> L

Durable lab state

• plan identity, kind, evidence gaps, assay intent, dependencies, batches, priority, samples, gates, and preflight checks;
• readiness inputs and findings for capacity, instruments, materials, staffing, budget, controls, provenance, evidence, and queue pressure;
• handoff artifacts, compatibility reports, contract issues, explanations, risks, exports, and approved transition lists;
• observations with metric, unit, replicate values, dispersion, normalization, QC, detection limits, censoring, batch concerns, and interpretation confidence;
• outcomes with result state, failure class, uncertainty, acceptance rule, and rerun policy;
• review-queue, assay-lifecycle, and promotion transitions with actor, reason, time, and audit issues;
• feedback, reconciliation, anomaly, latency, lineage-coverage, and outcome-dossier reports.

Ownership and immutability

Runtime may persist and transport these documents, but lab owns their operational meaning. Knowledge owns the normalized evidence after successful promotion. A later plan, rerun, or interpretation supersedes earlier state through linked records; it does not overwrite the approved handoff or original observation.

This separation allows a reviewer to reconstruct what was proposed, what was authorized, what was performed, what was observed, and what was finally accepted as evidence.

Preserve custody at every handoff

Record	Write authority	Becomes immutable when	Later changes appear as
advisory plan	scientific planning owner	cited by a readiness or decision record	superseding plan with rationale
executable plan	assay owner and required approvers	authorized for scheduling or handoff	revision linked to the prior plan; never an in-place protocol rewrite
readiness decision	named scientific, operational, and safety authorities	work is released, held, or refused	reevaluation against a new resource and risk snapshot
handoff	releasing and receiving custody owners	custody is acknowledged	deviation, amendment, cancellation, or replacement handoff
observation	operator and measurement system under the declared protocol	raw evidence and acquisition metadata are sealed	correction or derived record linked to original bytes
interpretation and failure classification	accountable reviewer	disposition is issued	superseding review with new evidence or policy identity
promotion decision	evidence authority	observation is accepted, qualified, rejected, or held for Knowledge	new promotion review; the observation remains unchanged

Storage administrators may move or replicate these records without changing their domain identity. Any transformation that changes content, units, relationships, or interpretation creates a new artifact with explicit lineage.