ARBITER Policy Reference Architecture

This paper proposes a reference architecture for ARBITER, the workload-authority and policy-routing member of the SkipJack Cognitive Exchange. It addresses one bounded question: what minimum functional stack could determine authority before optimization, issue a bounded route grant, preserve denial, expiry, revocation, invalidation, and quarantine semantics, and make it mechanically possible to detect whether economics or execution widened authority? The answer is presented as a set of typed contracts rather than as an implementation. The proposed stack accepts a typed workload envelope; consumes versioned identity, delegation, policy, provider-profile, and attestation inputs; filters prohibited and non-evaluable routes; freezes an eligible set before economic input; receives economic proposals only as non-authoritative rankings over that frozen set; constructs a signed, expiring, revocable, version-bound grant; manages post-issue lifecycle state without amending the grant; emits affirmative denial, defer, override, and evidence records; and hands execution a contract that permits only enforcement, narrowing, or refusal. The paper defines a comparison domain over compatible version vectors and proposes the containment invariant Apolicy(w) ⊇ Aeligible(w) ⊇ Agrant(w) ⊇ Aenforced(w). It also states the strongest counter-thesis: a disciplined composition of an existing policy-decision engine, authorization or token service, identity projection, and enforcement-side checks may already provide the joint property, leaving ARBITER as a requirement profile rather than a distinct layer. The proposal therefore carries explicit loss conditions, component-subtraction tests, a challenger-first alternative matrix, and a fully synthetic conformance protocol. Every component, state, set, contract, scenario, and progression rung remains proposed and unproven. No implementation, deployment, security result, compliance result, interoperability result, customer result, market result, or measured performance is claimed.