Skip to main content

COMPEL Glossary / actor-topology

Actor topology

A multi-agent topology in which agents communicate via message passing — with each agent as an isolated actor owning its own state and mailbox.

What this means in practice

Derived from the Hewitt actor model; provides strong isolation and reasoning-about-concurrency benefits, widely used in Erlang-style distributed systems.

Synonyms

actor-model MAS , message-passing topology

See also

  • Multi-agent orchestration — The architectural coordination of multiple cooperating agents — via hierarchical, market, swarm, or actor topologies — to achieve collective tasks.
  • Swarm topology — A multi-agent topology in which peer agents coordinate without central authority — via shared state, stigmergy, or direct peer messaging.
  • Agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol — The communication mechanism between AI agents — specifying message format, authentication, authorization scope, rate limiting, and audit logging.