Part 5: Multi-Agent Orchestration

Name: AI Agent Architecture: From Single Agent to Enterprise Multi-Agent Systems
Author: Wayland Zhang

From single Agent to multi-Agent: orchestration, coordination, collaboration

Chapter List

Chapter	Title	Core Question
13	Orchestration Fundamentals	How to coordinate multiple Agents working together?
14	DAG Workflows	How to handle task dependencies?
15	Swarm Pattern	How can a Lead Agent coordinate independent Workers?
16	Handoff Mechanism	How do Agents pass tasks and state to each other?

Learning Objectives

After completing this Part, you will be able to:

Design Orchestrator architectures
Implement DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) workflows
Use the Swarm pattern to coordinate Lead and Worker Agents
Handle Handoffs and state passing between Agents

Shannon Code Guide

Shannon/
├── go/orchestrator/internal/workflows/
│   ├── orchestrator_router.go          # Routing decisions
│   ├── dag_workflow.go                 # DAG implementation
│   └── supervisor_workflow.go          # Supervisor pattern
└── docs/multi-agent-workflow-architecture.md

Core Architecture

Orchestrator Router
    ├── SimpleTask (complexity < 0.3)
    ├── DAG (general multi-step tasks)
    ├── React (tool-intensive)
    ├── Research (information synthesis)
    └── Swarm (dynamic adjustment, collaboration, human feedback)

Prerequisites

Part 1-4 completed
Graph theory fundamentals (DAG, topological sorting)
Concurrent programming basics

@incollection{zhang2026aiagent_en_part5-overview, author = {Zhang, Wayland}, title = {Part 5: Multi-Agent Orchestration}, booktitle = {AI Agent Architecture: From Single Agent to Enterprise Multi-Agent Systems}, year = {2026}, url = {https://waylandz.com/ai-agent-book-en/part5-overview/} }