Last updated: 2026-10-03

P
Postgraduate research
APL
Applied / Methodological โ€” Knowledge with a 5โ€“10 year half-life โ€” stable practice

Agentic AI System โ€” Architecture (Skills & Tools)

High-level system diagram showing orchestrator, skills, tools, runtimes, data stores, and guardrails

Overview & Architecture

The design below is a general-purpose blueprint for an agentic AI system, drawn as a single reference diagram rather than a narrative report. It brings together several strands from the current agentic-AI literature: an orchestrator that interleaves reasoning with tool calls in the style of the ReAct pattern[1]; a skill/tool catalog that lets a model decide which external function to invoke and with what arguments, following the tool-use approach demonstrated by Toolformer[2]; and a vector database feeding retrieval into the model runtime, the retrieval-augmented generation pattern that combines a language model's parametric knowledge with an external, non-parametric index[3]. The event bus, sandboxed tool adapters, and audit log are this design's own choices for turning those patterns into a production-shaped system with policy enforcement and provenance tracking.

Architecture Diagram

Operator Console UI / Dashboard / Manual commands API / SDK Programmatic client & webhooks Agent Orchestrator Goal manager โ€ข planning โ€ข scheduler Planner / Policy Task Router Skills Catalog Skill metadata โ€ข signatures โ€ข constraints โ€ข WebFetcher โ€ข DataProcessor โ€ข Summariser โ€ข Planner Model Runtime Local LLMs โ€ข API-backed models โ€ข caching Skill Executor Executes skill code โ€ข isolates runs Event Bus / Task Queue Tool Sandbox & Policy Gate Web / HTTP Adapter Browser / Headless Filesystem / Shell External APIs & Tools External Services Third-party APIs โ€ข Web โ€ข SaaS โ€ข Internal DBs Observability & Monitoring Metrics โ€ข Traces โ€ข Logs Vector DB Embeddings โ€ข Retrieval State DB Agent state โ€ข sessions โ€ข checkpoints Audit Log Immutable actions โ€ข provenance Frontend / Operators Backend / Orchestrator Data stores Model / Cloud Runtime Security / Policy Message Bus / Queue
Diagram notes
Flow: Client โ†’ Orchestrator โ†’ Event Bus โ†’ Skill Executor / Model Runtime โ†’ Tool Adapters โ†’ External Services. Security & policy gates mediate tool access; observability and immutable audit capture provenance.

Component Overview & Subsystems

Skills
Discoverable units: metadata, I/O schema, security policy, sandbox requirements.
Tools
Adapters expose safe interfaces (web fetch, shell, file, APIs). All tool calls pass through policy & audit.
Runtimes
Model pool: local + API-backed with caching, routing, and cost controls.

References

  1. Yao, S., Zhao, J., Yu, D., Du, N., Shafran, I., Narasimhan, K., & Cao, Y. (2023). ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2023). arXiv:2210.03629
  2. Schick, T., Dwivedi-Yu, J., Dessรฌ, R., Raileanu, R., Lomeli, M., Zettlemoyer, L., Cancedda, N., & Scialom, T. (2023). Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools. arXiv:2302.04761
  3. Lewis, P., Perez, E., Piktus, A., Petroni, F., Karpukhin, V., Goyal, N., Kรผttler, H., Lewis, M., Yih, W., Rocktรคschel, T., Riedel, S., & Kiela, D. (2020). Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020). arXiv:2005.11401

Graduate Attributes

Modelled on this page

  • Subject Specialist: Technical components such as orchestrators, runtimes and guardrails are defined using precise disciplinary terminology.
  • Researcher: Design choices are linked to specific academic literature through numbered citations.
  • Digitally Fluent: A system diagram visualises the interaction between digital components rather than relying solely on text.

University of Reading Graduate Attributes framework.