Agent Orchestration

Process agents published

Also known as: Agent Coordination, Agent Management

Definition

The coordination of multiple agents or agent components to accomplish complex tasks. Orchestration determines which agent handles which subtask, manages communication between agents, handles failures and retries, and ensures the overall goal is achieved. Orchestration can be centralized (a supervisor or router controls agents) or decentralized (agents self-coordinate).

What this is NOT

  • Not the same as a workflow engine (orchestration involves dynamic decisions)
  • Not just running agents in parallel (orchestration implies coordination)
  • Not the agents themselves (orchestration is the coordination layer)

Alternative Interpretations

Different communities use this term differently:

llm-practitioners

The patterns and infrastructure for managing multiple LLM-based agents, including routing requests, managing agent lifecycles, passing context, and aggregating results.

Sources: LangGraph documentation, AutoGen orchestration patterns, OpenAI Swarm (experimental)

distributed-systems

Coordination of distributed services or processes, typically involving service discovery, load balancing, and workflow management.

LLM agent orchestration borrows concepts from service orchestration but adds reasoning about when to delegate vs. execute directly.

Sources: Kubernetes documentation, Service mesh patterns

Examples

  • A router that sends coding questions to a code agent and research questions to a search agent
  • A supervisor that breaks a task into subtasks, assigns them to specialists, and synthesizes results
  • LangGraph managing state transitions between multiple agent nodes
  • A pipeline that dynamically decides whether to retrieve, reason, or respond

Counterexamples

Things that might seem like Agent Orchestration but are not:

  • A single agent operating in isolation
  • Hard-coded sequential steps with no branching
  • Running the same prompt through multiple models and taking the first response

Relations

  • overlapsWith multi-agent-system (MAS requires orchestration for coordination)
  • requires agent (Orchestration coordinates agents)
  • overlapsWith workflow (Orchestration may include workflow-like sequential steps)
  • overlapsWith supervisor-agent (Supervisors are one orchestration pattern)

See Also

Implementations

Tools and frameworks that implement this concept: