Allostatic Control Systems: Goal Governance in Changing Environments

Abstract

Allostatic control systems govern not only how a system pursues a goal, but whether the goal itself remains appropriate as the environment changes. This matters whenever a controller can continue to regulate successfully against a reference that no longer serves the system.

The paper develops this as a two-timescale problem. A fast loop regulates under the current reference. A slow loop governs whether that reference should move, and one tested mechanism waits for mature outcome evidence before changing the defended reference.

In the preregistered synthetic experiment, the tested mature-evidence mechanism increased decision cost by 1.51% relative to otherwise identical bounded adaptation. The result is a negative result, not a validation claim. It shows that timing matters: evidence-to-effect pathways can arrive too late to improve goal governance before the environment changes again.

Fields and Methods

control systems, systems engineering, predictive control, adaptive thresholds, risk governance.

• two-timescale reference-governance model
• matched ungated ablation
• preregistered synthetic experiment
• development-only parameter selection
• fresh confirmatory streams
• deterministic post-result headroom diagnostics

Collaborator Profile

Control theorists, systems engineers, safety-critical systems researchers, aerospace engineers, cyber-physical systems researchers, and applied researchers working on adaptive thresholding under changing environments.

Validation Needed

• Replicate the preregistered negative result and audit the matched allostatic-versus-ungated comparison.
• Test whether other allostatic mechanisms can revise inappropriate goals before serviceability is lost.
• Separate maturity gating from ordering, staleness, and one-consumption evidence rules in follow-up experiments.
• Define domain-specific evidence maturity, admissibility, and safety constraints before applying the architecture outside the synthetic setting.

Publication Posture

This is a public institute preprint. It has passed Radiant's internal disclosure review but has not been peer reviewed. Its permanent arXiv record is arXiv:2607.21771 in eess.SY, cross-listed cs.SY. The institute-hosted PDF remains available as a secondary download.

Citation

Thomson D. Nguy. Allostatic Control Systems: Goal Governance in Changing Environments. arXiv:2607.21771 [eess.SY, cs.SY].

Research Correspondence

For collaboration inquiries or research correspondence about this work, contact contact@theradiantinstitute.org.