Runtime Legitimacy Architecture for Autonomous Fleets

Autonomous fleets are increasingly emerging across industrial automation, warehouse logistics, transportation systems and distributed physical AI environments. This paper introduces a conceptual runtime governance architecture for autonomous fleets and explores governance as a continuously relevant architectural relationship associated with distributed execution legitimacy during runtime operation. The proposed framework introduces concepts including fleet governance planes, distributed capability governance, runtime eligibility evaluation, governance-aware coordination and safety-bounded execution. Rather than prescribing specific implementation mechanisms, the paper intentionally remains implementation-independent and focuses on architectural governance relationships for future distributed physical AI ecosystems. The objective of this work is to establish a conceptual foundation for governance-constrained autonomous fleets and future runtime governance infrastructures for large-scale physical AI environments.