Making Industry Compilable: The Digital Reasoning Thread

Industrial digital threads connect data and artifacts across the product lifecycle, but the rationale behind decisions often remains fragmented across tools, teams and time. This position paper proposes the Digital Reasoning Thread (DRT) as a persistent, context-aware and auditable representation of reasoning artifacts spanning humans, agents and systems. Building on the authors’ earlier DRT whitepaper, the paper introduces industrial compilability: a governed check-and-transform path in which proposals are evaluated against explicit context, evidence obligations and domain-specific validation checks. Missing or contradictory evidence blocks action or triggers accountable escalation rather than being silently treated as success. The contribution comprises a conceptual architecture, seven proposed requirements and a synthetic engineering-change example illustrating how missing evidence prevents release of an action plan. DRT complements existing digital threads, digital twins and enterprise tools rather than replacing them. This is an initial, non-peer-reviewed position-paper preprint. It does not report a completed industrial compiler, executed experiments or measured performance improvements. Author affiliations do not imply institutional endorsement.