Orchestration Patterns and Governance Burden
Understand key orchestration patterns for agent-based systems, comparing single-agent, plan/execute, supervisor-worker, and multi-agent designs. Evaluate their effects on governance, fault isolation, audit requirements, approval processes, and cost. Learn to choose the simplest effective pattern to meet quality and oversight goals while maintaining a robust governance and audit trail.
Choosing an agentic approach does not determine its orchestration architecture. Orchestration is both a governance decision and a capability decision. Use the simplest pattern that satisfies the workload’s quality service-level objectives (SLOs) and oversight requirements.
A governed execution sequence may include evidence gathering, draft analysis, a recommendation, and, when authorized, a controlled action. The orchestration design specifies where planning occurs, which components may call tools, what state and execution metadata are retained to support audit and replay, and where execution can be paused, approved, or terminated while preserving accountability.
Four orchestration patterns as architecture boundaries
A single-agent pattern places planning and execution in one controller that iterates internally until it produces an output. Delegation isn’t explicit. Tool use, if allowed, is mediated by the same loop that generates the analysis and recommendations, so it concentrates both capability and accountability in one place.
In a plan/execute pattern, one step produces an explicit plan artifact and a separate step executes it, typically as a sequence of bounded actions. Planning becomes inspectable, and approval can attach to the plan boundary. Execution stays constrained to the plan: replayable, haltable, or partially completable with clearer semantics.
A supervisor-worker pattern introduces a supervisor that decomposes work into tasks, dispatches them to ...