conditionsdepend

Conditionsdepend is a concept used in systems modeling and software design to describe a dependency relation that is activated only when certain conditions are met. It is used to distinguish between unconditional dependencies and context-specific ones, reflecting how relationships can change with the situation or configuration.

In formal terms, a component A is conditionsdependent on component B if the existence or strength of the dependency from A to B depends on a conditioning set of variables or conditions C. This approach allows models to capture dynamic behavior where connections are not always active, but emerge or disappear as context changes. The idea is particularly relevant in conditional workflow design, feature-flag based configurations, and probabilistic models where dependencies are only meaningful under certain values of the conditioning variables.

In practice, examples of conditionsdepend appear when a step in a process only runs if a prior quality check passes, or when a downstream task relies on an upstream input only if that input meets a specified criterion. In probabilistic terms, conditional dependencies are represented by factors or edges that carry significance only under particular configurations of the conditioning variables.

There is no single formal syntax for conditionsdepend, as the term is used descriptively to highlight context-sensitive dependencies in diverse domains. Critics note that it can complicate analysis by obscuring when dependencies are active, while proponents argue it increases expressiveness for modeling real-world, context-dependent systems.

See also: conditional dependency, dependency graph, feature flag, conditional probability, causality.