AR-01
Reference architecture
Decision rights ↓ / Evidence ↑
Reference architecture
Two planes.
One loop.
Vantera is not organised as a hierarchy with software bolted on. It is organised as a decision plane that governs and a capability plane that performs. Decision rights travel down. Evidence travels up. Every other traffic pattern — status, escalation-by-relationship, the meeting held to share a number — was scaffolding, and it is gone.
Decision plane · governs
↓ Downward: decision rights
Bounded, named, revocable. A corridor carries exactly one decision class with one accountable owner.
↑ Upward: evidence
Context, route, guardrail checks, outcome. Evidence is how autonomy is earned — and how it is taken back.
Capability plane · performs
The operating loop
Sense → Decide → Act → Learn
01
Sense
Telemetry, orders, claims, crew status and market signal arrive continuously and are made decision-ready — not report-ready.
02
Decide
The corridor routes the case to the cheapest intelligence that clears its quality bar, checks every guardrail, and either commits or escalates.
03
Act
The commitment moves into the capability plane: a bay is booked, a crew turns, a rotable ships, a customer is told.
04
Learn
The outcome returns as evidence. Every override resolves into a playbook, a constraint, a precedent, a data repair or a change of intent.
A loop that does not close at Learn is not an operating model; it is an automation project.
Decision domains
Four classes of decision, governed separately.
Promise · commit
Commitment decisions to customers and stakeholders.
Overhaul quotes, uptime guarantees, spare-part lead times, contract terms on 5,900 service agreements.
Plan · allocate
Allocation decisions: capacity, capital, inventory, people.
Workshop slotting across 31 service hubs, rotable pool positioning, capital release for line upgrades.
Execute · adapt
Real-time adaptation as reality diverges from plan.
Technician dispatch, job resequencing, parts substitution, in-flight schedule recovery.
Recover · intervene
Intervention decisions and the extraction of learning from failure.
Breakdown triage, warranty and goodwill calls, field campaigns, root-cause encoding.
Intelligence supply chain
Intelligence is a factor of production. It is bought by the grade, like steel.
| Grade | Indicative cost | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Rules & constraints | ~€0.00 | Deterministic, high volume, encoded thresholds |
| Small local model | €0.004 | Classification, extraction, sovereign data |
| Hosted model + retrieval | €0.09 | Structured judgment against memory |
| Premium reasoning | €0.86 | Novel, ambiguous, cross-domain synthesis |
| Human judgment | €41.00 | Intent, values, novelty, irreversible trade-offs |
There is no AI department at Vantera. Routing policy belongs to the Global Decision Owner of each scope, and a rising premium share is treated as a cost signal and an encoding backlog — not a success metric.
Autonomy ladder
Earned, bounded, reversible.
L0 — Assist
The system prepares; a human decides every case.
L1 — Recommend
The system proposes with reasoning; a human commits.
L2 — Approve
The system decides; a human approves before it takes effect.
L3 — Sampled
The system commits; humans audit a sample and all near-boundary cases.
L4 — Bounded autonomy
The system commits inside the buoys; humans hold the exception path and the stop.
Promotion requires an evidence package. Demotion requires only evidence — and no meeting.
Vantera Industrial Group is a constructed illustration. Every figure on this site is ordinary and invented, in the manner the book requires of its own worked examples.