Enforcing Global Usage Constraints in Distributed Systems: A Formal Model of Directed Traceability

Traceability mechanisms ensure transparency and accountability in distributed systems, where autonomous entities interact concurrently with shared resources without complete knowledge of the global state. Most existing approaches are descriptive: they record interactions after execution without constraining them according to the predefined usage rules. This limitation is important when shared resources must be accessed in compliance with global constraints under concurrent executions. We introduce directed traceability as a protocol-level mechanism that governs interaction admission according to usage constraints and produces a compliant execution trace by construction. Unlike descriptive mechanisms or locally-validated approaches such as smart contracts, which enforce only local constraints, directed traceability achieves compliance through execution-time validation against global state. We formalize the problem through a multi-agent model and establish three theoretical properties: 1) directed mechanisms guarantee zero violation rate; 2) descriptive and locally-validated mechanisms exhibit structural violations under concurrency and global constraints; and 3) directed traceability induces a bounded latency overhead of O(k · (n + m)), where k is the number of constraints, n the number of agents, and m the number of resources. Numerical evaluation through a distributed container-based implementation yields violation rates of 28%–35% (descriptive), 5%–10% (locally validated), and 0% (directed); a rise to 10% violations for local validation under global constraints; and a latency factor of approximately 100× for the directed mechanism under the tested container-based deployment. Compliance follows from protocol design rather than post-execution audit.