CCARF Practice Question

Paper 5 · Question 10

D1 Agentic Architecture & Orchestration · Paper 5

[Scenario: Multi-agent Research System] While researching a broad topic, you observe that the web-search agent and the document analysis agent investigate the same subtopics, leading to substantial duplication in their outputs. Token usage nearly doubles without a proportional increase in research breadth or depth. What is the most effective way to address this?

• A.Allow both agents to finish in parallel, then have the coordinator deduplicate overlapping results before passing them to the synthesis agent.
• B.The coordinator explicitly partitions the research space before delegating, assigning each agent distinct subtopics or source types.
• C.Implement a shared-state mechanism where agents log their current focus area so other agents can dynamically avoid duplication during execution.
• D.Switch to sequential execution where document analysis runs only after web search completes, using web-search results as context to avoid duplication.

Show answer & explanations

Correct answer: B

A: Deduplicating after both agents finish still spends the tokens. The overlap already happened.

B: Having the coordinator explicitly partition the research space before delegating is most effective because it addresses the root cause—unclear task boundaries—before any work begins. It preserves parallelism while preventing duplicated effort and wasted tokens.

C: A live shared focus log couples the agents and races. Assigning distinct subtopics before they start avoids that.

D: Waiting for web search to finish removes parallelism and still does not give each agent its own slice of the topic.

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