MACS — Multi-Agent Coordination System

MACS is the Agent OS. It provides the six subsystems every multi-agent deployment needs — resource scheduling, access control, audit, cross-validation, batch processing, and storage — plus a kernel that enforces their decisions.

MACS is modelled on IBM z/OS. z/OS proved that a well-designed OS can host hundreds of concurrent programs, enforce security boundaries, audit every decision, and schedule resources by business importance — all in one address space. MACS applies the same architecture to agent systems.

Architecture

Agent (sg-architect, do-developer...)
        │
        ▼
┌───────────────────────────────┐
│  MAEA Middleware (≈ CICS)     │
│  Routing · Session · Lifecycle│
└───────────────┬───────────────┘
                │
                ▼
┌───────────────────────────────┐
│  MACS Agent OS (≈ z/OS)       │
│                               │
│  ┌─────────┐ ┌─────────┐     │
│  │ §2 WLM  │ │ §3 Sec  │ ... │
│  │ Resource│ │ Access │     │
│  │ Scheduler│ │Control │     │
│  └─────────┘ └─────────┘     │
│                               │
│  Kernel: Arbiter · Brake · Audit │
└───────────────────────────────┘

Subsystems

Subsystem	What it does	IBM lineage	Status
§2 WLM	Goal-oriented resource scheduling (CPU + Token)	IBM WLM	✅ CPU · 🚧 Token
§3 Security	Access control + behavioral trust + hard constraints	RACF	✅
§4 Audit	Immutable trace chain + decision receipts	SMF	✅
§5 XVal	Dual-model cross-validation for subjective agents	(Agent-native)	📋
§6 JES	Batch job scheduling + priority queues	JES2	📋
§7 DFSMS	Knowledge lifecycle + memory compression	DFSMS	📋
§8 VTAM	Protocol admission + multi-transport	VTAM	📋

Five IBM transplants. One Agent-native (XVal — COBOL compiles; agent outputs don't).

Specification

The canonical specification lives in the MAEA Framework repository:

→ MACS Governance Specification (v2.0)

The spec is the single source of truth. This repository holds reference implementations of the subsystems.

Subsystem Repos

Subsystem	Implementation
§2 WLM	deeparchi-ai/wlm — Go, cgroup v2 + PSI, 7 unit tests
§4 Audit	a2a-go PR #365 — a2aext/trace, 10 unit tests
§6 JES	macs/integrations/jes-gate — WLM-aware cron admission control

v0 Artifact: Decision-Chain DUMP (now §4 Audit)

CICS DUMP/SLIP, for agents.

The first MACS implementation was a recoverability tool: observer hooks that capture a per-turn ring buffer and, on trigger (tool failure, API error, latency over budget), freeze the entire decision chain into a self-contained macs.dump.v0 artifact. This is now part of the Audit subsystem (§4).

macs/dump/
  model.py       # macs.dump.v0 artifact builder + schema constants
  schema.json    # JSON Schema (the interop contract)
  triggers.py    # SLIP-style predicate engine
  collector.py   # per-turn ring buffer → assemble dump on trigger
  sinks.py       # file/jsonl (all writes fail-open)
  adapters/
    hermes.py    # NousResearch/hermes-agent observer hooks → core
integrations/hermes-plugin/   # drop-in Hermes plugin (stdlib-only)

Quick test:

python tests/test_triggers.py
python tests/test_collector.py
python tests/test_hermes_adapter.py
# or: pytest -q

Hermes install:

cp -r integrations/hermes-plugin  <hermes>/plugins/observability/macs_dump
hermes plugins enable observability/macs_dump
# dumps land in ~/.hermes/macs-dump/<date>/  (+ index.jsonl)

Zero core changes. Fail-open. Read-only observer hooks.

Related

• MAEA Framework — architecture + specs
• WLM — resource scheduler
• a2a-go — A2A protocol Go SDK (+ trace)

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DeepArchi Team · 2026-07-03 · MIT License