Clear, degraded, or not observable are different answers.
Silence is only meaningful when the system can see. VESU makes coverage state part of the product output. The TMC should not have to infer monitoring loss from a missing alert.
One status. Always known. Always reported.
Health checks pass. Stage 1 returning structured frames on cadence. Detection runs normally.
Glare, blur, rain, fog, low light. Signal is degraded but not gone. Operator sees a yellow dot — not a green one.
Frozen feed, mis-aimed view, total obstruction. The coverage gap is the event.
Camera health is not a DevOps metric. It is a TMC-relevant event.
If the camera is frozen, dark, blocked, pointed away from the road, or sitting in a PTZ transition, the TMC has lost situational awareness for that view.
Grouped by intent, labelled by maturity.
Not every class is equally production-ready. The ontology is honest about which classes ship today, which are advisory, which are being evaluated, and which are designed-for-later.
Coverage state changes the decision.
A candidate from a degraded camera is not the same as a candidate from a healthy one. The publication gate uses both — and the operator sees the difference.
The boundaries of the system are part of the product.
If you would like to walk through how a specific class is currently scoped — production, advisory, evaluating — we are happy to do that with your traffic operations team.