Partstate

Partstate is a term used in manufacturing and software engineering to denote the current condition or status of a discrete part within a system or process. It provides a concise snapshot of where the part stands in its lifecycle, from initial reception through final disposition, and is commonly used to coordinate processes, track progress, and support decision making.

In practice, a partstate is modeled as an object or record with fields such as state, timestamp, actor, and optional metadata. The state field is typically an enumerated value chosen from a defined set of statuses. A partstate may also include a history log of state changes, along with contextual information like location, lot or batch identifiers, and quality or inspection results. This data enables traceability and auditing of the part’s journey through a system.

Common states include pending, active, completed, failed, paused, cancelled, and archived. Transitions between states are driven by events (such as start, finish, fail, resume) and may be subject to validation rules, business workflows, or automated guards. In many implementations, partstate is designed to be lightweight yet extensible to accommodate domain-specific requirements.

Applications of partstate appear in manufacturing execution systems, quality control and inventory management, build and deployment pipelines, and asset lifecycle tracking. In software contexts, partstate helps manage the status of subcomponents within composite objects or modular architectures, supporting coordinated updates and rollback if needed.

See also: state machine, lifecycle, status, workflow.