Multi-Agent Reference Architecture Capabilities
Subsystem capabilities spanning user interaction, gateway, agent runtime, knowledge, LLM, MCP, evaluation, and observability.
User Interaction
Surfaces that capture user intent and return agent outputs, including human review.
CCC.MARefArc.CP01User-facing application surface
Presentation and orchestration surface (web, mobile, chatbot, workflow tool, or integrated enterprise system) that captures user intent, forwards requests to the agent layer, and returns agent outputs.
CCC.MARefArc.CP02Human-in-the-loop output review
Application-embedded controls that allow users to review, approve, or modify agent outputs before they are executed or shared.
Agent Gateway
Ingress routing, registry, and zero-trust guardrails before agent execution.
CCC.MARefArc.CP03Agent registry and lifecycle management
Catalog of available agents with their capabilities, metadata, and configuration, supporting versioning, lifecycle management, and controlled onboarding of new agents.
CCC.MARefArc.CP04Agent request routing
Validates incoming application requests and routes each to the correct agent or agent group, abstracting agent-layer complexity behind a consistent interface.
CCC.MARefArc.CP05Agent-ingress zero-trust guardrails
Treats all inputs as untrusted and enforces authentication, authorization, input validation, content filtering, access control, rate limits, and dynamic policy before any request reaches an agent.
Agent Runtime
Sandboxed agent execution, tools, memory, and collaboration patterns.
CCC.MARefArc.CP06Agent collaboration and orchestration patterns
Supports supervisor/worker decomposition, skills-based routing, and agent-as-a-tool handoff for decomposing and executing complex tasks across multiple agents.
CCC.MARefArc.CP07Unified sandboxed agent runtime
Secure, sandboxed environment where all agentic reasoning and execution occurs, providing task state management for pause/resume/handoff and intercepting and validating tool calls with credentials handled securely within the sandbox.
CCC.MARefArc.CP08Built-in trusted tools
A collection of bundled, trusted tools providing fundamental capabilities: the MCP client bridge to the external MCP layer, a sandboxed shell, workspace I/O, and web search.
CCC.MARefArc.CP09Agent memory
Short-term in-session context management (trimming and summarization to control length, cost, and latency) and durable long-term memory across sessions, including session summaries and user/task personalization.
CCC.MARefArc.CP10Sandboxed workspace file system
A sandboxed, persistent file system that agents use to read and write files, enabling work with large artifacts.
CCC.MARefArc.CP11Adaptive learning
Generates learning signals based on execution outcomes to refine prompts, adjust agent configurations, or improve tool-selection strategies.
Knowledge
Authoritative sources and retrieval used to ground agent reasoning.
CCC.MARefArc.CP12Authoritative knowledge source bases
Internal and external repositories of structured data, unstructured documents, and graph-based representations that provide authoritative information for grounding.
CCC.MARefArc.CP13Vector-based semantic retrieval
Vector databases providing semantic search and grounding so agents can find relevant information from large text corpora.
LLM
Approved models, inference routing, and model-interaction guardrails.
CCC.MARefArc.CP14Approved-model registry and lifecycle
Catalog of approved models with metadata, version information, configuration parameters, and usage constraints, ensuring agents access only models meeting organizational, regulatory, and security standards.
CCC.MARefArc.CP15LLM inference gateway routing
Validates inference requests and routes each to the correct model instance, abstracting model hosting behind a consistent interface.
CCC.MARefArc.CP16Model-interaction zero-trust guardrails
Enforces authentication and authorization for every inference request and applies input validation against prompt injection, output filtering and redaction, access control, rate limits, and cost management before and after model execution.
MCP
Approved MCP servers, connection routing, and tool-call guardrails.
CCC.MARefArc.CP17Approved MCP server registry and lifecycle
Catalog of approved MCP servers with metadata, capabilities, configuration, and usage constraints, ensuring agents connect only to servers meeting organizational, security, and compliance requirements.
CCC.MARefArc.CP18MCP connection gateway routing
Validates MCP connection requests and routes each to the correct server instance, abstracting MCP connectivity behind a consistent interface.
CCC.MARefArc.CP19MCP-interaction zero-trust guardrails
Enforces authentication and authorization for every MCP request and governs which agents may use which tools, applying rate limits and validating tool-call parameters.
Evaluation
Human oversight, runtime protection, and feedback loops.
CCC.MARefArc.CP20Feedback engine
Collects and aggregates structured and unstructured feedback from users, evaluators, and automated systems, including correctness assessments, preference signals, and quality ratings, to inform system improvement.
CCC.MARefArc.CP21Human supervision and oversight
Mechanisms for human reviewers to inspect, approve, correct, or override agent outputs, supporting human-in-the-loop and human-over-the-loop workflows for sensitive or high-impact tasks.
CCC.MARefArc.CP22Runtime protection
Monitors agent actions and model outputs during execution to detect unsafe, non-compliant, or anomalous behavior, enforcing constraints, blocking disallowed actions, or triggering escalation.
Observability
Telemetry, anomaly detection, and cross-layer signal correlation.
CCC.MARefArc.CP23Cross-layer telemetry collection
Captures logs, traces, metrics, and events emitted by every layer to support debugging, auditability, distributed tracing, and operational monitoring across the request lifecycle.
CCC.MARefArc.CP24Anomaly detection
Identifies unusual or unexpected patterns across telemetry to surface failures, regressions, misuse, or emerging risks before they impact performance or compliance.
CCC.MARefArc.CP25Signal correlation
Correlates signals across logs, traces, metrics, and events into a unified view, connecting symptoms to root causes across cross-layer dependencies.