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COMPEL Glossary / multi-agent-orchestration

Multi-agent orchestration

The architectural coordination of multiple cooperating agents — via hierarchical, market, swarm, or actor topologies — to achieve collective tasks.

What this means in practice

Raises distinct governance concerns over single-agent systems: emergent behavior, collusion, cascading hallucination, and deceptive delegation.

Synonyms

MAS orchestration , multi-agent system orchestration

See also

  • Multi-agent system (MAS) — A system composed of multiple interacting AI agents — each with its own goals, memory, tool access, and decision logic — that communicate and coordinate to achieve individual or collective objectives.
  • Hierarchical topology — A multi-agent topology in which a boss agent delegates sub-tasks to worker agents and aggregates their results.
  • Market topology — A multi-agent topology in which agents bid on tasks and a market mechanism assigns the task to the most-suitable agent — typically via contract-net protocol.
  • Swarm topology — A multi-agent topology in which peer agents coordinate without central authority — via shared state, stigmergy, or direct peer messaging.
  • 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.

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