In a multi-agent system, an Orchestrator is a controlling agent or service responsible for managing the entire workflow. Its primary role is to interpret a high-level goal, perform task decomposition, and then coordinate the execution of the resulting subtasks across a team of specialized “worker” agents.
The orchestrator acts as the “thinker” or “project manager” of the system. It maintains the overall plan, often represented as a dependency graph, and is responsible for:
- Assigning tasks: Dispatching subtasks to the appropriate specialist agents.
- Managing execution order: Ensuring tasks are performed in the correct sequence, respecting dependencies.
- Handling data flow: Managing the handoff points between agents so that outputs are correctly passed as inputs.
- Aggregating results: Synthesizing the outputs from various agents into a final, coherent response.
By centralizing the coordination logic, the orchestrator allows worker agents to remain simple and focused on their specific capabilities. This separation of concerns is a key architectural pattern for building robust and scalable agentic systems.