MOLE™ — Minimum Operational Life Evidence: Operational Mode for Evidential Safety in Unstable Environments

MOLE™ (Minimum Operational Life Evidence) defines the operational mode of the SAFE-Matter™ evidential safety governance framework for environments where continuous assurance cannot be maintained.Such environments include vacant buildings, construction sites, partially completed structures, and unmanaged or degraded assets where system continuity, maintenance, and reliability cannot be assumed.Traditional safety models rely on periodic inspection and historical records to infer system condition. In unstable environments, this results in reliance being placed on systems without current evidential validation.MOLE replaces this inference with a minimum evidential threshold required to justify reliance. It introduces compressed Evidence Renewal Intervals (ERI), accelerated trust decay, and deterministic enforcement based on the presence or absence of valid evidence.Within MOLE, the absence of current evidence is treated as a defined and enforceable state (UNVERIFIED), representing a condition where reliance cannot be justified.MOLE extends SAFE-Matter into environments characterised by uncertainty, ensuring that unknown risk is explicitly identified, measured, and governed rather than assumed.