In a multi-agent workflow, one of five parallel agents stops producing output and its assigned tasks remain incomplete. The other four agents have completed their tasks and are waiting. How should the system respond?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation and Infographic
A construction foreman doesn't let the whole crew stand around waiting because one worker didn't show up — they reassign the work and document the absence. When an agent stalls, the correct response is detection, termination, redistribution, and logging: keep the work moving without losing accountability.
Full explanation below image
Full Explanation
Degraded coordination in multi-agent workflows requires automated detection and graceful recovery mechanisms to maintain system throughput and reliability.
Why C is correct: A well-designed orchestrator implements heartbeat or timeout-based liveness checks for each agent. When an agent exceeds its expected completion time or stops sending heartbeat signals, it is declared stalled. The orchestrator terminates the stalled agent (or its execution context), logs the failure with diagnostic information, and redistributes the incomplete tasks to available agents. This approach recovers quickly without human intervention and maintains a complete audit record.
Why A is wrong: Waiting indefinitely for a stalled agent blocks the entire workflow and may cause timeouts in downstream systems. In production, unresponsive processes must be actively managed, not awaited passively.
Why B is wrong: Canceling the entire workflow and restarting all five agents wastes the completed work of the four healthy agents. Recovery should be scoped to the failing component, not the entire workflow.
Why D is wrong: Submitting partial results as complete is a dangerous deception. Downstream processes may operate on the assumption that all tasks were completed, leading to incorrect conclusions, missing data, or missed defects.