Chapter 29. Swimlanes

Swimlanes visually group tasks related to one group or user. For example, you can create a marketing task swimlane to group all User Tasks related to marketing activities into one Lane.

29.1. Lanes

"A Lane is a sub-partition within a Process (often within a Pool)…​ " [18]

A Lane allows you to group some of the process elements and define their common parameters. Note that a lane may contain another lane.

To add a new Lane:

  1. Click the Swimlanes menu item in the Object Library.
  2. Drag and drop the Lane artifact to your process model.

This artifact is a box into which you can add your User Tasks.

Lanes should be given unique names and background colors to fully separate them into functional groups. You can do so in the properties panel of a lane.

During runtime, lanes auto-claim or assign tasks to a user who has completed a different task in that lane within the same process instance. This user must be eligible for claiming a task, that is, this user must be a potential owner. If a User Task doesn’t have an actor or group assigned, it marks the task as having no potential owners. At runtime, the process will stop its execution.

For example, suppose there are two User Tasks, UT1 and UT2, located in the same lane. UT1 and UT2 have group field set to the analyst value. When the process is started, and UT1 is claimed, started, or completed by an analyst user, UT2 gets claimed and assigned to the user who completed UT1. If only UT1 has the analyst group assigned, and UT2 has no user or group assignments, the process stops after UT1 had been completed.


[18] Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). Version 2.0, OMG Document Number: formal/2011-01-03 http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0