A legal-discovery solution uses a lead coordinator agent that decomposes each matter into research tasks, assigns those tasks to specialist subagents (privilege review, timeline extraction, entity linking), collects their partial results, and decides whether further rounds of work are needed. Specialists do not talk to each other directly. Which orchestration pattern is being described?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
A lead agent that breaks work up, farms it to specialists, gathers results, and may loop again—with specialists not talking sideways—is the orchestrator-subagent (hub-and-spoke) pattern. Peer mesh would have specialists communicating as equals. A fixed sequential pipeline has no adaptive coordinator loop. A single-agent monolith has no real subagents. D matches the description.
Full Explanation
Correct answer: D. Multi-agent orchestration patterns include hub-and-spoke / orchestrator-subagent designs: a coordinator owns decomposition, dispatch, synthesis, and optional control loops, while specialists execute scoped tasks without requiring full peer connectivity.
A is incorrect because peer-to-peer implies lateral agent communication and equal authority, which the scenario explicitly excludes.
B is incorrect because a strict fixed pipeline lacks the coordinator’s adaptive multi-round assignment behavior.
C is incorrect because a single prompt with no subagents is not multi-agent orchestration.
Exam focus: map “coordinator + specialists + synthesis + optional loops” to orchestrator-subagent.