Agentic Design

Patterns
🏛️

Hierarchical Coordination(HC)

Multi-level agent coordination with supervisory relationships, centralized orchestration, and authority delegation

Complexity: highMulti-Agent

🎯 30-Second Overview

Pattern: Multi-level agent coordination with supervisory relationships, centralized orchestration, and authority delegation

Why: Enables scalable task decomposition, policy enforcement, quality control, and clear accountability chains

Key Insight: Hierarchical structure + task delegation + escalation protocols = enterprise-grade coordination

⚡ Quick Implementation

1Define Hierarchy:Establish supervisor-subordinate tiers with clear authority levels
2Task Decomposition:Break complex goals into hierarchical subtasks (HTN-style)
3Delegation Protocol:Implement task assignment with acceptance criteria and SLAs
4Escalation Rules:Define when and how issues bubble up hierarchy
5Monitor & Coordinate:Track execution, aggregate results, enforce policies
Example: ExecutiveAgent → ManagerAgents → TeamLeadAgents → WorkerAgents

📋 Do's & Don'ts

✅Define explicit roles, permissions, and authority boundaries per tier
✅Use structured task specifications with clear success criteria
✅Implement bounded re-decomposition with recursion depth limits
✅Summarize between levels to control context growth
✅Use smaller models for routine tasks, larger for strategic decisions
✅Instrument comprehensive traces and audit logs per tier
❌Create single points of failure at supervisor level
❌Allow excessive escalation that inflates latency and cost
❌Use ambiguous authority that blocks worker task completion
❌Forward full transcripts across tiers instead of summaries
❌Skip policy enforcement checks at higher tiers

🚦 When to Use

Use When

  • • Complex workflows requiring approval gates and oversight
  • • Enterprise systems needing policy enforcement
  • • Large-scale operations with interdependent subtasks
  • • Scenarios requiring clear authority and accountability
  • • Multi-step processes with quality control checkpoints
  • • Operations needing resource authorization and allocation

Avoid When

  • • Simple single-step tasks without coordination needs
  • • Real-time systems where review latency breaks SLAs
  • • Creative brainstorming requiring fluid collaboration
  • • Small teams where hierarchy creates unnecessary overhead
  • • Highly dynamic environments requiring rapid adaptation

📊 Key Metrics

Task Success Rate
End-to-end completion vs flat baseline
Tier Latency
P50/P95 processing time per hierarchical level
Escalation Rate
Percentage of tasks requiring higher-tier review
Policy Compliance
Violations caught and resolved at checkpoints
Resource Utilization
Cost and compute efficiency across tiers
Delegation Accuracy
Successful task assignments without rework

💡 Top Use Cases

Enterprise Workflows: Multi-tier approval processes for compliance, finance, procurement with policy enforcement
Incident Response: Command hierarchy with incident commander, team leads, and specialists for systematic resolution
Research Projects: Principal investigator, project managers, research teams with peer review and publication oversight
Manufacturing Operations: Plant managers, line supervisors, operators with quality control and safety protocols
Software Development: Architects, tech leads, developers with code review, testing, and deployment approval gates

References & Further Reading

Deepen your understanding with these curated resources

Recent Academic Research (2024-2025)

AgentOrchestra: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Framework for General-Purpose Task Solving (Zhang et al., 2025)

Multi-Agent Collaboration via Evolving Orchestration (Dang et al., 2025)

Towards Effective GenAI Multi-Agent Collaboration: Design and Evaluation for Enterprise Applications (Shu et al., 2024)

Multi-Agent Coordination across Diverse Applications: A Survey (2025)

Foundational Papers & Theory

Hierarchical Task Network Planning: Formalization and Analysis (Nau et al., 2003)

Options: An Introduction to Temporal Abstraction in Reinforcement Learning (Sutton et al., 1999)

Federated Control with Hierarchical Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (2017)

HuggingGPT: Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in Hugging Face (Shen et al., 2023)

Enterprise Implementation Frameworks

AWS Multi-Agent Orchestration with Amazon Bedrock (2024)

Microsoft Azure AI Agent Design Patterns (2024)

IBM AI Agent Orchestration Guide (2024)

Anthropic Multi-Agent Research System Architecture (2024)

Implementation Frameworks & Tools

LangGraph Multi-Agent Supervisor Pattern (2024)

Microsoft AutoGen - Manager-Worker Agent Patterns (2024)

CrewAI Hierarchical Agent Management (2024)

OpenAI Swarm - Agent Orchestration Framework (2024)

Industry Case Studies & Applications

Enterprise Multi-Agent System Market Analysis (2024-2025)

Organizational Coordination Theory - MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

The Open Group: Coordination & Process Management (DPBoK)

Venture Capital Trends in Multi-Agent Systems (2020-2024)

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