Handling shared state across multi-agent conversations in AutoGen

[Arpanwanwe]

I've been working on developing multi-agent systems (like planners, executors, reviewers, and tool callers) using AutoGen, but one of the continual problems I face is the ability to keep track of information that is shared between multiple instances of dialogue (when multiple instances of dialogue happen simultaneously).

While AutoGen provides an efficient way of passing messages from one agent to another to maintain a linear flow of communication between agents, once you introduce the concept of retrying actions, executing on conditional paths and completing longer-running tasks the context that is generated by each agent during execution of a specified command is generally spread throughout the messages exchanged between the agents and the application's business logic. This makes it difficult to understand why agents acted the way they did, or to duplicate them.

To resolve this issue, I have been developing a mechanism where agents would operate from a common shared specification/state, instead of just working from conversation history. Recently I began evaluating this idea alongside AutoGen for compatibility with a small-scale orchestration type system (Zenflow) to determine if there was an increase in detailed analysis capabilities. I am still working through the benefits and drawbacks of this method.

I would like to know what type of solutions others working with AutoGen have created. Are they focusing on having a single location for defining the application's shared state, are they extending the base agent classes to define specific states for each agent, or are they using other means (such as an external state machine) to manage and assist in coordinating the actions of agents?