Agent Orchestrator

Agent Orchestrator

Design multi-agent systems with proven coordination and delegation patterns.

Workflow

Design Workflow

1. Identify the task domain and decompose into agent roles
2. Select an orchestration topology from the topology guide
3. Define inter-agent communication protocol
4. Implement delegation rules and conflict resolution
5. Add observability and fallback handling

Evaluation Workflow

1. Map existing multi-agent system to topology patterns
2. Check for single points of failure
3. Verify delegation boundaries and escalation paths
4. Score against the orchestration checklist

Orchestration Topologies

Five topologies for multi-agent coordination. Read the relevant reference for templates.

Topology Selection Guide

Customer service system (triage → route → resolve): → Topology 1 (Hub-and-Spoke) with triage coordinator

Data processing pipeline (extract → transform → validate → load): → Topology 2 (Pipeline) with validation gates between stages

Code review system (multiple reviewers in parallel): → Topology 3 (Broadcast) with consensus aggregation

Enterprise workflow (departments with sub-teams): → Topology 4 (Hierarchical) with department-level coordinators

Collaborative research (agents share findings dynamically): → Topology 5 (Mesh) with shared knowledge graph

Agent Role Definition Template

When defining agent roles, specify:

<agent name="[NAME]" role="[ROLE]">
  <capabilities>
    - [Specific capability 1]
    - [Specific capability 2]
  </capabilities>
  <boundaries>
    - Cannot [limitation 1]
    - Cannot [limitation 2]
  </boundaries>
  <inputs>[What this agent receives]</inputs>
  <outputs>[What this agent produces]</outputs>
  <escalation>[When and how to escalate to coordinator]</escalation>
</agent>

Inter-Agent Communication Protocol

Message Format

<agent_message>
  <from>[sender_agent]</from>
  <to>[receiver_agent]</to>
  <type>[request|response|broadcast|escalation]</type>
  <payload>[structured data]</payload>
  <context>[relevant state for receiver]</context>
  <priority>[low|normal|high|critical]</priority>
</agent_message>

Delegation Rules

• Coordinator MUST include task context in every delegation
• Worker agents MUST report completion status back to coordinator
• Failed tasks MUST include error details and partial results
• Escalation MUST happen when confidence drops below threshold

Conflict Resolution

When multiple agents produce conflicting outputs:

1. Voting — majority wins (use for low-stakes decisions)
2. Authority — designated expert agent decides (use for domain-specific conflicts)
3. Escalation — human-in-the-loop resolves (use for high-stakes ambiguity)
4. Synthesis — coordinator merges compatible parts (use when outputs are complementary)

Anti-Patterns

• God Agent — one agent does everything, others are stubs
• Chat Loop — agents endlessly request clarification from each other
• State Amnesia — agents lose context between interactions
• Over-delegation — breaking tasks too fine, coordination cost exceeds benefit
• Missing Fallback — no recovery path when a worker agent fails

Validation Scripts

Validate orchestration topology configs with automated scoring (0-10):

python3 scripts/validate_topology.py <config_file> [--strict]

Checks topology detection, agent count, required sections (roles, routing, communication, error handling), and flags anti-patterns (SPOF, deadlocks, shared mutable state).