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COMPEL Glossary / deadman-switch
Deadman switch
A fail-safe stop that halts the agent when heartbeats from supervising systems cease for a defined interval.
What this means in practice
Defends against the case where the supervisor itself is unavailable or compromised; the default-stop posture ensures the system degrades to the safe state.
Synonyms
deadman halt , heartbeat-loss halt
See also
- Escalation protocol — Deterministic rules that pause the agent and escalate to a human for decision — triggered by low confidence, high-consequence tool calls, out-of-distribution inputs, or explicit agent request.
- Circuit breaker (agent tool) — A circuit-breaker pattern applied specifically to agent tool calls: when a tool's failure rate exceeds a threshold, the breaker opens and blocks further calls to that tool.