{"dossiers":[{"portfolio_id":"EXP06-PARTNER-15","plain_language_title":"Separate Release Effects from River Disturbances","one_sentence_summary":"Test whether a model of verified reservoir operations can filter predictable downstream changes from operators’ attention without hiding protected signals, coincident environmental events, or model failures.","problem_plain":"Reservoir releases can predictably alter downstream water level, temperature, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, and turbidity. These large, expected changes can flood ordinary dashboards and fixed alarms, leaving operators to decide whether each warning reflects the release or a separate problem such as contamination, bank failure, or unexpected sediment movement. Widening thresholds during releases reduces nuisance alarms but can also create a blind spot precisely when an external event may coincide with operations.","proposal_plain":"Before downstream readings arrive, copy each authorized gate or turbine command and compare it with measured actuator behavior. A frozen, versioned model would predict when and how the release should affect each monitoring station. The system would preserve every raw reading, calculate signed observed-minus-predicted residuals, and direct reliable or consequential unexplained changes to an operator queue. A residual would always retain enough command, model, station, timing, and sensor information to reconstruct the full observation. Critical ecological limits, dam-safety variables, compliance records, sensor faults, and public-warning conditions would bypass filtering. Unverified actuation, excessive uncertainty, model drift, missing heartbeats, incompatible versions, or failed reconstruction would restore full-signal review. Residuals could prompt investigation or separately reviewed recalibration, but could not alter gates or emergency actions.","transfer_plain":"The predictive-residual archetype is mapped strongly here: a copy of the reservoir’s own command predicts its delayed sensory consequences, and the difference between prediction and observation highlights what the command does not explain. The mapping adds actuator verification, uncertainty weighting, reconstruction, raw-data audits, and a fallback because an environmental predictor must never become grounds for erasing consequential observations.","why_it_advanced":"This entered the empirical-partner lane because release modeling, gate-operation modeling, continuous monitoring, quality control, and alarm-management practices make a bounded replay plausible. It did not clear the strict-success lane: no site has supplied synchronized records, and there is no measured evidence yet for event recall, protected-signal routing, reconstruction, fallback reliability, workload reduction, or lower total burden.","prior_art_and_open_claim":"Adjacent systems already model reservoir operations and downstream water quality, detect sensor anomalies, and manage alarms. The narrower open comparison is whether conditioning a frozen model on both the issued command and measured actuation can outperform an unchanged raw-threshold dashboard: at least 30% less routine review, 100% routing of protected signals, at least 95% detection and acknowledgement of scripted coincident departures, reconstruction within declared tolerances, and correct fallback for every injected fault. No exact implementation or comparative result was established.","test_and_decision":"With one reservoir partner, preregister a historical release replay with a contiguous untouched holdout. Freeze the model, stations, uncertainty assumptions, protected classes, tolerances, and fallback rules. Blindly add conductivity, turbidity, and dissolved-oxygen departures; inject actuator mismatch, dropout, checksum conflict, travel-time shift, and persistent bias; and compare with the unchanged dashboard. Reject the claim if review falls by under 30%, any protected signal is suppressed, scripted-event detection is below 95%, any injected fault misses fallback, reconstruction exceeds tolerance, or total labor is not lower. Only a complete pass permits a read-only shadow release.","deployment_and_cost":"The first step is retrospective and then shadow-only; existing dashboards, staffing, operating procedures, and control authority remain unchanged. Rough 2026 resource-equivalent bands are $50,000–$250,000 for first evidence, $250,000–$1 million for initial startup, $1–$5 million for operational launch, and $250,000–$1 million annually. These are assessment bands, not vendor quotes or site estimates.","risks_and_uncertainties":["A contaminant or sediment pulse arriving during a release could be predicted away as an operational effect.","A logged command may not match physical gate or turbine movement, corrupting the downstream prediction.","Wrong travel time could turn one event into misleading positive and negative residuals at different times.","Season, tributary inflow, channel change, stratification, or shared upstream-data errors could invalidate the model.","Expected release effects may still breach ecological or compliance limits and therefore cannot disappear from review context or records, even if they are accurately predicted."],"expert_types":["Reservoir operations engineer","River water-quality scientist","Hydrologic or hydraulic modeler","Environmental incident-response lead","Continuous-sensor quality specialist subject to relevant independence safeguards"],"expert_questions":["Are command, measured-actuator, upstream-condition, tributary, weather, sensor, alarm, and acknowledgement records synchronized well enough for the preregistered replay?","Which stage, dissolved-oxygen, conductivity, and turbidity conditions must always bypass residual filtering?","What variable-specific reconstruction errors and travel-time errors are acceptable before full-signal fallback?","Can blinded coincident events be designed so they represent consequential external disturbances without being trivially detectable?","Does total operator, modeling, audit, and investigation labor remain below the raw-dashboard baseline at equal completeness?"],"ranking_note":"The harmonized score placed this candidate between ranks 13 and 19, in band B. That score is only a post-hoc reading order using a cost-band affordability proxy; it is not an experimental endpoint, elapsed-time estimate, deployment finding, or measure of economic value.","source_ids_used":["S1","S2","S3","S4","S5","S6","S7","S8"]},{"portfolio_id":"EXP06-PARTNER-18","plain_language_title":"A Storage-Independent Aircraft Maintenance Ledger","one_sentence_summary":"Define and test maintenance-obligation behavior independently of database layout so backend changes cannot silently alter configuration, usage, credit, conflict, or due-status answers.","problem_plain":"Aircraft maintenance clients may read shared tables and calculated columns directly, each making its own assumptions about record order, nulls, unit conversions, corrections, installations, counter resets, and maintenance credit. A database migration, cache redesign, or replay into a new backend can therefore change whether an obligation appears satisfied, remaining, overdue, or indeterminate even when the underlying evidence is logically unchanged. Different clients may also produce conflicting answers with no common behavioral standard for deciding which is correct.","proposal_plain":"Create an opaque aircraft maintenance-obligation ledger whose public operations establish a baseline, submit typed evidence, supersede rather than erase an erroneous event, produce an as-of snapshot, query an obligation, compare revisions, and explain the evidence behind a status. Its abstract state would include configuration, serialized components, usage, requirements, credited accomplishments, conflicts, supersession links, and immutable history. Preconditions would define identifiers, units, timing, authority, applicability, and correction links. Invariants would prohibit deleted history, double installation, unsupported credit, and definite answers from contradictory evidence. Relational, event-log, graph, or cached implementations would remain hidden and would have to pass the same generated operation-sequence tests. The ledger would report evidence and conflict states; authorized personnel would still decide maintenance credit, deferrals, aircraft status, and operational release.","transfer_plain":"The representation-independent contract archetype maps directly to the ledger. It replaces database rows as the effective interface with an abstract state, explicit transitions, stable errors, evidence explanations, and a common black-box oracle. Opacity alone is insufficient: each backend must map to the same ledger meaning, and client code must stop reconstructing maintenance status from hidden storage details.","why_it_advanced":"This qualified for a bounded partner study because regulated record integrity, digital interoperability, mature maintenance systems, and established migration audits make isolated replay feasible. It did not enter strict success: no dependency audit, controlled representation perturbation, independent model, mutant suite, leakage audit, or comparative result exists, and no operator has approved the complete semantics for even one obligation type.","prior_art_and_open_claim":"Maintenance standards already cover information exchange, electronic logbooks, allowable configuration, transfer records, and due-status business rules; commercial systems already manage configurations, utilization, compliance, and component status. Append-only logs, typed APIs, and migration audits also address parts of the problem. The narrower open claim is that an opaque evidence-state contract plus an independent reference model and shared sequence oracle will catch semantic defects and preserve identical observable behavior across two differently represented backends more reliably than schema checks, record counts, and sampled reports.","test_and_decision":"With an operator or MRO and an authorized records reviewer, preregister one obligation type and at least 100 curated histories plus generated sequences. Compare an incumbent wrapper and independent immutable model with schema, count, and sampled-report checks. Seed defects for duplicated utilization, erased superseded evidence, insertion-order dependence, double installation, and silent conflict resolution. Require identical revisions, statuses, errors, and provenance explanations between nominal implementations, and rejection of every seeded defect. Reject the claim if the baseline catches the same defects, any mutant passes, valid implementations need schema exposure to agree, contradictory evidence must become definite, or representation-only perturbations reveal no actual client dependency.","deployment_and_cost":"Begin with de-identified or synthetic histories in a read-only isolated environment; do not write official records or connect results to dispatch or release workflows. Rough 2026 resource-equivalent bands are $50,000–$250,000 for first evidence, $250,000–$1 million for startup, $1–$5 million for operational launch, and $250,000–$1 million annually. They are not quotations or organization-specific estimates.","risks_and_uncertainties":["The abstract state may omit maintenance-program, jurisdiction, configuration, or evidence-authority context required to interpret an obligation.","The independent model may repeat the incumbent’s mistaken rule or be too simple to adjudicate complex histories.","Generated cases may miss irregular but valid corrections, counter changes, or applicability sequences.","Events labeled independent may actually have order-dependent maintenance meaning.","Opaque storage could hinder investigation if evidence explanations and sanctioned audit access are inadequate, while deterministic outputs could be mistaken for release authority."],"expert_types":["Authorized aircraft maintenance-records specialist","Maintenance-planning or continuing-airworthiness engineer","MRO systems architect","Aviation software assurance and test specialist","Regulatory compliance or airworthiness counsel"],"expert_questions":["Which single obligation type has semantics complete enough to specify units, applicability, cutoffs, corrections, conflicts, and authority?","Which clients currently read tables, calculated columns, row order, nulls, or local credit rules?","What contract-level evidence explanation is necessary for an authorized reviewer to resolve every seeded divergence?","Which event pairs truly commute, and which only appear independent until configuration applicability is considered?","What regulatory acceptance, retention, privacy, cybersecurity, and controlled-data conditions would govern any move beyond shadow replay?"],"ranking_note":"The harmonized review placed this candidate from rank 7 to 28, in band B. This wide, post-hoc reading range is not an experimental endpoint or evidence of value; its pilot-speed input was only a cost-band affordability proxy, with elapsed time unscored.","source_ids_used":["S1","S2","S3","S4","S5","S6","S7","S8"]},{"portfolio_id":"EXP06-PARTNER-20","plain_language_title":"Portable Rules for Drought-Stage Advice","one_sentence_summary":"Specify drought-stage recommendation behavior independently of any spreadsheet or dashboard, then test whether a second engine can reproduce it without relying on hidden formulas, fields, colors, or evaluation order.","problem_plain":"A drought plan’s stage calculation may live in one spreadsheet, dashboard, indicator service, or rules engine. Staff and connected procedures can start depending on cell locations, colors, proprietary scores, rounding, formula order, or undocumented treatment of missing data. Replacing or refactoring that implementation can then change an escalation, recovery, or indeterminate result even though the approved policy and hydrologic evidence were supposed to remain the same. The reason for the change may be impossible to reconstruct cleanly.","proposal_plain":"Define an opaque drought-stage recommender whose public state includes the current recommended stage, assessment time, evidence sufficiency, pending transition, policy and parameter versions, and stable reason categories. Operations would initialize a version, assess or advance with typed evidence, invalidate withdrawn inputs, query the recommendation, and export an immutable receipt. Inputs must meet declared rules for units, time windows, location, eligibility, freshness, and coverage. The same abstract history must produce the same result; missing required evidence cannot silently become a normal stage; hysteresis and persistence must follow the approved policy; and rejected calls cannot change state. Formulas, database structures, vendor fields, caches, colors, and evaluation order remain hidden. A shared black-box suite would test boundaries, histories, corrections, missingness, receipts, errors, and leakage. Official declarations, restrictions, allocations, and public messages remain with the designated authority.","transfer_plain":"The representation-independent contract archetype is a strong structural match. The proposal separates the policy-facing behavior—stages, sufficiency, transitions, reasons, errors, and receipts—from any spreadsheet or rules engine. A replacement is acceptable only under the same approved policy version and after common conformance tests; changing a threshold or hysteresis rule is a policy change, not an implementation substitution.","why_it_advanced":"This reached the empirical-partner lane because real programs use multi-indicator stages, formal trigger governance exists, and environmental-data standards demonstrate typed exchange and black-box conformance. It did not reach strict success: no real workflow dependency has been documented, no independent engine has been compared, and no authority has approved the proposed semantics for missingness, corrections, invalidation, or hysteresis.","prior_art_and_open_claim":"Drought programs already define indicators, stages, triggers, governance, and history-sensitive assessment; WaterML standardizes observation exchange, and environmental-data APIs have executable conformance tests. These are adjacent rather than empty territory. The remaining claim is narrower: for one frozen policy version, a stateful contract covering insufficiency, time order, hysteresis, corrections, invalidation, stable reasons and errors, and receipts will let an independently built engine substitute without any contracted-output divergence or client dependence on internal representation.","test_and_decision":"In a six-to-eight-week non-live partner study, freeze one approved policy and completed assessment packet. Preregister evidence quantities, units, freshness, coverage, stages, transitions, missingness, corrections, reasons, receipts, boundary outcomes, and tolerances. Compare the incumbent through an adapter, an independent decision-table engine, and current manual or schema-only validation across threshold, unit, field-order, stale-data, repeated-snapshot, escalation, recovery, correction, and invalidation cases. Reject the problem premise if no hidden dependency appears and substitution requires no client change or output correction. Reject the intervention if any mutant passes, two passing engines disagree, or expressing the policy requires exposing the incumbent representation.","deployment_and_cost":"The first study is sandboxed, non-authoritative, and disconnected from declarations, restrictions, allocations, controls, and public communications. Rough 2026 resource-equivalent bands are $10,000–$50,000 for first evidence, $50,000–$250,000 for startup, $250,000–$1 million for operational launch, and $50,000–$250,000 annually. These bands are not vendor quotes and lack external comparable-cost evidence.","risks_and_uncertainties":["The contract could accidentally turn an undocumented spreadsheet quirk into approved drought policy.","A finite suite may miss a threshold boundary or assessment history that changes a consequential recommendation.","Equivalent software behavior would not show that the indicators, thresholds, or policy are scientifically, legally, or equitably appropriate.","Stable reason categories may omit nuance required by hydrologists or decision-makers.","Generated cases may miss correlated missing data or unusual corrections, and shadow outputs may still encourage unauthorized automation."],"expert_types":["Drought-program policy owner","Operational hydrologist","Water-utility drought planner","Environmental software and conformance-test engineer","Legal, equity, and public-communications reviewer"],"expert_questions":["Which document and authority determine the approved policy when spreadsheet behavior and written rules disagree?","What exact evidence, freshness, coverage, hysteresis, and missing-data rules must the contract express?","Do any current clients depend on cells, colors, vendor scores, rounding, reason text, or evaluation order?","Which deliberately mutated engines would represent the most decision-relevant implementation errors?","What outputs and labels are necessary to prevent a shadow recommendation from being treated as an official declaration?"],"ranking_note":"The harmonized review placed this candidate between ranks 14 and 20, in band B. This is a post-hoc reading order, not an experimental endpoint, economic-value score, or pilot-duration estimate; affordability was proxied from the rough cost band.","source_ids_used":["S1","S2","S3","S4","S5","S6","S7","S8"]},{"portfolio_id":"EXP06-PARTNER-23","plain_language_title":"Portable Rules for Delphi Rounds","one_sentence_summary":"Test whether survey, spreadsheet, and analysis implementations can preserve the same Delphi-round lifecycle and anonymity boundary under one storage-independent behavioral contract.","problem_plain":"A multiround public-health Delphi exercise may spread enrollment, anonymous responses, closure, aggregation, feedback, revision, and withdrawal across a survey platform, spreadsheets, email, and analysis scripts. Each tool can treat eligibility, missing answers, late submissions, replacements, withdrawal, and participant identity differently. When data moves or a tool changes, matching questionnaires and columns does not show that the same responses entered the aggregate, the same feedback population was used, or the same anonymity promises survived.","proposal_plain":"Define a Blind Iterative Elicitation State with operations to enroll an eligible participant through a separate identity service, issue an unlinkable study handle, open a round, accept or replace a response before closure, record withdrawal, close the round, calculate a declared aggregate, publish controlled feedback, begin the next round, and export an audit view. The contract would allow one active response per eligible handle, question, and round; forbid post-closure mutation; derive feedback only from the declared closed population; apply a sponsor-approved withdrawal policy; and block ordinary analysis from resolving identities. Preconditions, errors, side effects, versioning, and sanctioned identity recovery would be explicit while vendor fields, spreadsheet rows, email routing, and storage remain hidden. Every implementation would have to pass the same sequence and leakage tests before holding authoritative round state.","transfer_plain":"The representation-independent contract archetype maps well to the procedural state of Delphi rounds. It defines observable enrollment, response, withdrawal, closure, aggregate, feedback, and identity-access behavior without choosing a survey or storage format. The transfer is limited, however: technical equivalence cannot preserve participant experience, facilitator judgment, or the social context that may influence elicitation quality.","why_it_advanced":"This entered the empirical-partner lane because Delphi is established in government and health research, mature tools implement most lifecycle functions, and a synthetic two-implementation test is readily bounded. It was not a strict success: no migration incident evidence, committed sponsor, executable contract, adapter comparison, mutant result, or leakage result exists, and the governing legal and withdrawal rules remain unspecified.","prior_art_and_open_claim":"Existing Delphi products already support anonymous participation, multiple rounds, response revision, feedback, stopping rules, and study identifiers. Reporting guidance makes methodological choices more explicit, while vendor-neutral study-data standards support portable records. The narrower unresolved claim is that two independent implementations of one sponsor-approved synthetic protocol will agree on every contracted lifecycle and identity-access observation, reject every single-rule semantic mutant, and reveal no predeclared identity-linkage channel through allowed outputs. This is compositional proximity, not a novelty finding.","test_and_decision":"Within six weeks, have a method owner preregister a synthetic two-round protocol covering eligibility changes, duplicates, replacement, missing and late answers, pre- and post-closure withdrawal, failed closure, two aggregation rules, feedback, and identity-resolution attempts. Build independent in-memory and spreadsheet-backed implementations, run identical scripted and generated histories, and add at least eight single-rule mutants. Reject the claim if an approved workflow cannot be expressed, implementations pass while disagreeing on any contracted observation, any mutant survives, or handles, timestamps, ordering, filenames, errors, or exports expose a predeclared linkage channel. Compare with reconstruction through the ordinary spreadsheet/export procedure; use no real experts or active records.","deployment_and_cost":"Start entirely offline with synthetic participants, non-live questions, isolated identity mappings, and no authoritative study migration. Rough 2026 resource-equivalent bands are $10,000–$50,000 for first evidence, $50,000–$250,000 for startup, $50,000–$250,000 for operational launch, and $10,000–$50,000 annually. These labor-equivalent bands are not vendor quotes and exclude unverified licensing, security, procurement, and integration costs.","risks_and_uncertainties":["The contract may encode one contested Delphi method as if it were a universal technical invariant.","Generated histories may omit the unusual event orderings most likely to expose disagreement.","Study handles could remain linkable through timing, ordering, filenames, metadata, or error messages.","A simple reference implementation could acquire unwarranted authority over sponsor-approved methodological choices.","Passing lifecycle tests would not show that the expert panel is representative, its judgments are accurate, or the participant experience is equivalent across tools."],"expert_types":["Delphi methodologist","Public-health workforce foresight program owner","Research data-protection or privacy officer","Survey-platform and research-software engineer","Study sponsor or research-governance reviewer"],"expert_questions":["Which withdrawal, replacement, eligibility, aggregation, feedback, and identity-recovery rules has the sponsor actually approved?","Which ordinary outputs could link pseudonymous handles to people through timing, ordering, filenames, metadata, or errors?","Do the generated sequences cover every meaningful pre- and post-closure failure path?","Can two implementations represent the approved workflow without importing vendor-specific identifiers or spreadsheet behavior?","Does the ordinary spreadsheet/export comparator detect the same seeded mutants, and at what review effort?"],"ranking_note":"The harmonized review placed this candidate between ranks 13 and 24, in band B. This post-hoc ordering is not a preregistered endpoint, validation, or economic-value measure; its pilot-speed input is only an affordability proxy derived from the rough cost band.","source_ids_used":["s1","s2","s3","s4","s5","s6","s7","s8"]}]}