Event context signal

Overview

event_context is a heuristic routing signal family for structured event metadata extracted from request text: event type, severity level, temporal urgency, and domain-specific action codes.

It maps to config/signal/event-context/ and is declared under routing.signals.event_context_rules.

Key Advantages

• Zero ML inference — all matching is regex-based, running in sub-millisecond time.
• Routes enterprise event-driven payloads (error alerts, audit logs, incident reports) to specialized model pools without requiring a domain classifier.
• Confidence is proportional to the number of matched criteria, giving the decision engine a graded signal.
• Temporal urgency detection (urgent, immediate, asap, deadline, time-sensitive, now, critical.window) routes time-sensitive events independently of event type.

What Problem Does It Solve?

Keyword and embedding signals are tuned for natural-language queries. Structured event payloads — JSON fragments, alert messages, transaction error codes — contain well-defined fields that keyword matching cannot model cleanly. event_context provides a named, composable signal for each class of event without forcing operators to write fragile regex keyword rules.

When to Use

Use event_context when:

• requests contain machine-generated event payloads (error alerts, audit logs, transaction failures)
• you want to route by severity tier independently of event type
• domain-specific action codes (e.g. TXN_DECLINE, AUTH_FAIL) should deterministically select a model pool
• time-sensitive events need to bypass standard latency-tolerant queues

Configuration

routing:
  signals:
    event_context_rules:
      - name: critical_payment_event
        event_types:
          - payment_failed
          - transaction_declined
        severities:
          - critical
          - high
        action_codes:
          - TXN_DECLINE
        temporal: true

Fields

Field	Type	Description
name	string	Rule name referenced in routing.decisions[].rules
event_types	list of strings	Event type patterns to match (case-insensitive word boundary)
severities	list of strings	Severity keywords: critical, high, medium, low
action_codes	list of strings	Domain-specific action codes (case-insensitive word boundary)
temporal	bool	When true, matches urgency markers: urgent, immediate, asap, deadline, time-sensitive, now, critical.window

A rule matches when at least one configured criterion is satisfied. Confidence is 0.5 + 0.5 × (matched_criteria / total_criteria). With up to four criteria (event_types, severities, action_codes, temporal), a single-criterion match on a four-criterion rule yields 0.625; a full match always yields 1.0. A rule with only one configured criterion that matches also yields 1.0.

Example Decision

routing:
  decisions:
    - name: route_critical_event
      rules:
        type: event_context
        name: critical_payment_event
      modelRefs:
        - name: fast-response-model