Boundary Validation

Status: implementation-facing MVP for ADAPTIVE-WP-0004.

Purpose

This document describes the first explicit boundary engine now available in adaptive_pricing_core.boundary_engine.

The engine turns pricing-policy intent into inspectable validation outcomes instead of leaving viability checks implicit in dashboard review.

Inputs

The validator accepts:

a canonical PricingModel
a PricingConfiguration describing expected usage, fee assumptions, cost allocation, optional price overrides, and commitment terms
a BoundaryPolicy defining hard and soft limits

Constraint Types

Current MVP constraints cover:

segment eligibility
expected usage variance limit
payment fee ceiling
cost-floor coverage
minimum margin
target-margin approval threshold
discount exposure ceiling
discount approval threshold
commitment-backed concession enforcement

Hard constraints reject a configuration. Soft constraints mark it as valid only with approval.

Commitment Logic

The engine treats a concession as any configuration that weakens seller economics relative to the model baseline under the same scenario assumptions.

A concession is considered meaningfully backed only when at least one of these protections is present:

minimum monthly turnover at or above modeled monthly revenue
prepayment covering at least one modeled month
guaranteed platform fee at or above modeled monthly revenue
customer-funded onboarding that neutralizes onboarding cost
materially longer contract duration
reduced cancellation flexibility

Outputs

Validation returns a ValidationResult with:

decision: accepted, requires_approval, or rejected
valid and requires_approval
a human-readable summary
machine-readable configuration snapshot
machine-readable economics metrics
per-constraint results with reasons, thresholds, and suggested actions

Coulomb Adapter

The Coulomb observatory exposes this engine through observatory.boundary.build_boundary_validation().

That adapter currently uses:

observed per-period payment fee rate
observed AI usage cost
observed per-member infrastructure cost allocation
conservative default policy thresholds

This is intentionally an MVP policy surface. Later milestones can replace these defaults with seller-managed governance data and richer LTV-aware constraints.

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