Integrity Preservation Theory (IPT): A Constitutional Framework for the Evaluation of Integrity in Bounded Systems

Integrity Preservation Theory (IPT) presents a constitutional framework for preservation-oriented integrity evaluation in bounded systems. Unlike evaluative frameworks centered on performance, safety, compliance, or reliability, IPT formalizes integrity as a distinct preservation property governing whether a bounded system remains sufficiently preserved to be treated as the same evaluative object through time. The manuscript develops the constitutional foundations of bounded system evaluation, evidence sufficiency, continuity, degradation, recoverability, measurement architecture, mathematical formulation, integrity state architecture, implementation methodology, and cross-domain validation. Reference implementations in healthcare and agentic artificial intelligence demonstrate that the same constitutional architecture can be instantiated across materially different domains while preserving architectural invariants and maintaining IPT's explicitly non-sovereign evaluative role. This publication is accompanied by the publicly available IPT Reference Lab, which provides an executable constitutional proof corpus and reference implementation.