HAL Status Normalisation Policy

This document defines the frozen canonical status contract for hardware HAL adapters. Any alias change is a contract change and must follow the evidence gate below.

Canonical status set

• submitted
• queued
• running
• completed
• cancelled
• failed
• unknown (fallback only)

Frozen alias matrix

Two contract tiers are enforced:

• Extended tier (Azure, Braket, qBraid, Qiskit, IonQ, Strangeworks, Pasqal, OQC, IQM, Quantinuum): full matrix below.
• Baseline tier (currently QuEra Bloqade): only completion/queue/running/ cancellation/failure aliases.

Canonical	Accepted aliases
completed	complete, completed, success, succeeded
running	running, in_progress, in-progress, inprogress
submitted	submitted, initializing, initialising, starting, creating, created
queued	queued, pending
cancelled	cancelled, canceled, aborting, cancelling, canceling
failed	failed, error

Evidence-gated alias extension rule

New aliases are forbidden unless all conditions hold:

1. A real provider token is captured in artifact evidence (job metadata, provider payload, or execution logs) and linked from the session report.
2. The alias is added to the frozen matrix tests in tests/test_hardware_hal_status_normalisation_contract.py.
3. Adapter-level tests are updated for impacted backends.
4. Full HAL regression (tests/test_hardware_hal_*.py) remains green.
5. This policy file is updated in the same change.

Without these five conditions, reject alias additions.

Baseline-tier completion extras

Baseline-tier adapters may additionally accept done and finished as completion aliases, but those aliases are not part of the extended-tier common contract.