Describing Agentic AI Systems with C4: Lessons from Industry Projects
🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the lack of standardized architectural documentation methods tailored to the collaborative and interactive nature of industrial-scale agent-based AI systems, a gap that hinders their maintainability and long-term evolution. To bridge this gap, the paper proposes a specialized modeling approach grounded in agent-oriented architectural styles, extending the C4 layered model with domain-specific modeling vocabularies and viewsets that explicitly capture agents, artifacts, tools, and their coordination patterns. The method further integrates quality-gating mechanisms to ensure documentation consistency. Empirical validation across multiple industrial case studies demonstrates that the proposed approach significantly enhances the clarity and maintainability of architectural documentation while effectively supporting continuous system evolution.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
Different domains foster different architectural styles -- and thus different documentation practices (e.g., state-based models for behavioral control vs. ER-style models for information structures). Agentic AI systems exhibit another characteristic style: specialized agents collaborate by exchanging artifacts, invoking external tools, and coordinating via recurring interaction patterns and quality gates. As these systems evolve into long-lived industrial solutions, documentation must capture these style-defining concerns rather than relying on ad-hoc code sketches or pipeline drawings. This paper reports industrial experience from joint projects and derives a documentation systematics tailored to this style. Concretely, we provide (i) a style-oriented modeling vocabulary and a small set of views for agents, artifacts, tools, and their coordination patterns, (ii) a hierarchical description technique aligned with C4 to structure these views across abstraction levels, and (iii) industrial examples with lessons learned that demonstrate how the approach yields transparent, maintainable architecture documentation supporting sustained evolution.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Agentic AI Systems
Architecture Documentation
C4 Model
Industrial AI
Coordination Patterns
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Agentic AI
C4 model
architecture documentation
coordination patterns
software architecture
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