[MS] A Tour of Handoff Orchestration Pattern - devamazonaws.blogspot.com
A Tour of the Handoff Orchestration Pattern Most multi-agent systems start out simple: a router agent receives a user request, picks the right specialist, and forwards the conversation. As long as each specialist can complete its task in one pass, that model works fine. The first time it breaks is when an agent needs more: a follow-up question for the user, additional context from another specialist, or a realization mid-turn that the request belongs somewhere else entirely. At that point, a fixed pipeline or one-shot router isn’t enough. What you need is a small, bounded graph where agents themselves decide who should speak next, without losing conversation context or violating guardrails. Handoff Orchestration in Microsoft Agent Framework is the pattern built for that case. The developer declares the participating agents and the directed edges between them, and the framework injects the tool calls each agent uses to transfer control along those edges. Routing decisions stay wit...