Agent Orchestration Control Layers (AOCL) Protocol

Agent Orchestration Control Layers (AOCL) is a protocol that standardizes how an orchestrator processes incoming events by passing them through a layered control pipeline. AOCL defines an eleven- layer taxonomy covering ingress normalization, identity scoping, smart routing, policy gating, plan decomposition, context retrieval, prompt shaping, delegation and execution, verification, response assembly, and audit writeback. The protocol is runtime-agnostic and framework-agnostic, producing auditable governance traces as a first- class output. AOCL supports both sequential pipeline and directed acyclic graph (DAG) execution modes, with explicit bypass and branch semantics that mandate audit records for all control-flow deviations.