Blackboard

Problem

If the agents work in isolation, they cannot build on each other's findings and duplicate or miss work. If they message each other point to point, every new agent forces edits to every other agent that should hear from it, and the protocol grows into a brittle web. If they share an unstructured mutable workspace without discipline, concurrent writes race and overwrite useful intermediate state. The team needs a coordination shape that is more flexible than a strict pipeline but more disciplined than free shared memory.

Solution

Establish a shared store (file, database, in-memory). Each agent reads the relevant slice and writes its contribution under structured keys. Optional event notification when keys change. Conflict resolution is policy-driven (last-write-wins, version-vector, append-only).

When to use

• Multiple agents collaborate and need a shared workspace they can read from and write to.
• Explicit point-to-point messaging would require an over-engineered protocol for the coordination shape.
• Conflict resolution policy (last-write-wins, version-vector, append-only) is acceptable for the workload.