Decide what an agent does when nobody answers its approval request

You are designing the approval step in an automation. Below is the workflow and the action that needs a human to say yes. Decide what happens when the human does not reply.

1. APPROVAL INVENTORY - table: Action needing approval | Who approves | How urgent | Cost of acting without approval | Cost of not acting at all.
2. TIMEOUT RULE PER ACTION - the wait period, then one of: proceed, proceed in a reduced form, cancel, or hold and re-ask. Justify each against the two costs above.
3. ESCALATION LADDER - who gets asked second and third, how long between steps, and when the run is abandoned instead of escalated.
4. THE MESSAGE - the approval request itself: what it must show so the approver can decide in ten seconds, and the reply formats you will accept.
5. STATE AND RESUMPTION - what the run stores while waiting, what happens if an approval arrives after the timeout fired, and how a duplicate approval is handled.
6. AUDIT - what to record per approval so the decision can be reconstructed later.

Rules: no preamble. Do not invent SLAs, rota names or tooling we did not mention.

WORKFLOW AND THE ACTION NEEDING APPROVAL: {{paste}}
WHO APPROVES AND HOW THEY ARE REACHED: {{paste}}