ADR-334: Hierarchical Consensus Topology for Large-Scale Swarm Coordination

Status: Proposed Date: 2026-05-29 Authors: claude (dream-cycle agent, 2026-05-29) Issue: ruvnet/ruflo#TBD Related: ADR-103 (witness temporal history), ADR-104 (federation wire transport)

Context

Ruflo's hive-mind currently uses flat Raft consensus: one leader, N workers, O(N²) message complexity in the worst case. The configured maximum is 8 agents (CLAUDE.md anti-drift default). This ceiling is a product of the protocol, not the hardware.

The 2026 research literature has converged on two complementary improvements:

SWARM+ (arXiv:2603.19431, March 2026, Grade A): Adapts PBFT for distributed workload management via a two-tier hierarchy — a small coordinator group (3-5 nodes) runs Byzantine-tolerant consensus among themselves, then delegates shards of the task space to worker clusters that use lightweight crash-fault Raft internally. Benchmarked at 1,000 agents with 97-98% scheduling latency improvement over flat baseline and ≤7.5% degradation under 50% agent failure.

SwarmHarness (arXiv May 2026, Grade A): Introduces Shapley-value credit attribution so individual skill nodes are weighted by marginal contribution to recent task outcomes. Without this, flat consensus treats all agents as equivalent — a low-quality agent can veto or slow progress on the same footing as a high-quality one.

Ruflo has no mechanism for either. Adding more than 8 agents today will not improve throughput; it may degrade it due to Raft leader bottleneck.

Decision

Adopt a two-tier hierarchical consensus topology for hive-mind swarms with agentCount > 20:

Coordinator tier (3 or 5 nodes, odd): runs existing Raft for crash-fault tolerance among trusted orchestrator agents. Elected via current queen-coordinator logic.
Worker shard tier: N/shardSize clusters, each ≤10 agents, each with an internal shard-leader elected by the coordinator. Intra-shard communication is direct (no consensus); only shard-leader reports to coordinator.
Credit vector: Each shard-leader maintains a Shapley approximation per agent (task contribution / total tasks). Agents with score < 0.1 over a 20-task window are flagged for replacement.

The existing 8-agent flat Raft path remains unchanged for agentCount ≤ 20 (no regression).

Consequences

Positive:

Scales to 200+ agents without O(N²) message explosion
Credit attribution enables quality-weighted task routing
Validated by SWARM+ at 1,000 agents (Grade A benchmark)
Backwards-compatible (flat path unchanged below threshold)

Negative:

Increases complexity in @claude-flow/cli hive-mind module (~400 LOC addition)
Shard-leader election adds ~50-100ms to swarm startup above 20-agent threshold
Shapley credit requires N+1 task completions before first signal (cold-start latency)

Neutral:

No change to MCP tool surface
No change to memory namespace or AgentDB schema
maxAgents: 8 CLAUDE.md default remains correct for anti-drift coding swarms

Implementation Notes

Target file: v3/@claude-flow/cli/src/hive-mind/consensus/hierarchical-topology.ts

Coordinator tier: reuse RaftManager (existing). Shard tier: new ShardCluster class with ShardLeader role. Credit vector: CreditTracker using banzhee/sampling approximation to avoid O(2^N) Shapley computation.

Threshold config key: hiveMind.hierarchicalThreshold (default: 20). Expose as --hierarchical-threshold N CLI flag on swarm init.

References

arXiv:2603.19431 — SWARM+: Scalable and Resilient Multi-Agent Consensus
arXiv (May 2026) — SwarmHarness: Skill-Based Task Routing via Decentralized Incentive-Aligned AI Agent Networks
Dream Cycle Research: v3/docs/research/dream-cycle-2026-05-29-swarm.md