Beyond the LLM: Architecting Real-Time Multi‑Agent Systems with Open‑Source Orchestration Frameworks
Introduction Large language models (LLMs) have transformed how we think about intelligent software. The early wave of applications focused on single‑agent interactions—chatbots, document summarizers, code assistants—where a user sends a prompt and receives a response. However, many real‑world problems demand coordinated, real‑time collaboration among multiple autonomous agents. Examples include: Dynamic customer‑support routing where a triage agent decides whether a billing, technical, or escalation bot should handle a request. Autonomous trading desks where risk‑assessment, market‑data, and execution agents must act within milliseconds. Complex workflow automation for supply‑chain management, where inventory, procurement, and logistics agents exchange information continuously. Building such systems goes far beyond prompting an LLM. It requires architectural patterns, stateful communication, low‑latency orchestration, and robust error handling. Fortunately, a vibrant ecosystem of open‑source orchestration frameworks—Ray, Temporal, Dapr, Celery, and others—provides the plumbing needed to turn a collection of LLM‑powered agents into a reliable, real‑time multi‑agent system (MAS). ...