Standalone Survival and Self-Governance HEAIN Core Protocol 1.3: Automatic Role Return, Operation Through Network Partitions, and Hierarchy-Wide Configuration Governance for Fractal Edge AI
Abstract
Abstract HEAIN-CORE-1.1 [5][6] showed that the seven core procedures of the HEAIN Core Protocol run correctly on real hardware, and HEAIN-CORE-1.2 [9] made promotion climb several levels. Five limitations still kept the system from being ready for real outages: role return was manual and last-in, first-out; a "network cut" could not be told apart from a "dead parent"; configuration was set by per-node flags; the data lifecycle lacked several mechanisms; and 13 cases of the Triad of Structural Immunities [7][8] were still open. This paper presents HEAIN Core Protocol 1.3 (HEAIN-CORE-1.3), which closes all of them through four contributions: (1) automatic return of roles to their installed owners, skipping several levels and out of order when needed; (2) witness-based decisions on which side of a network partition was cut off, with the cut-off side running STANDALONE, keeping a signed, encrypted, hash-chained journal ordered by a hybrid logical clock, and reconciling it on reconnection with nothing lost or duplicated, under per-zone rate limits; (3) the two-tier Configuration API of HEAIN-CORE-1.0 [3][4], with the four-eyes rule, propagation down the hierarchy by inheritance, override and lock, and runtime role assignment; and (4) the data lifecycle defined as a fifth cross-cutting concern, including binding jobs to the zone of their data. Every mechanism was live-tested on an HP Z840 and then validated at system level in an 11-node container simulation of the CineNexus Pro case study: 24 scenarios in 7 rounds, 232 checks, all passed. The simulation also found 13 further core defects that the per-mechanism tests could not see; all of them are fixed. Keywords: HEAIN Core Protocol, Network Partition, Standalone Operation, Offline Journal, Hybrid Logical Clock, Configuration Governance, Data Lifecycle, Data Locality, Edge Computing