Flow Objects

According to Wikipedia,

Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a workflow.

More historical and overview are shown the Wikipedia page for BPMN. In this post, we will overview the major elements that can be used while modeling a process using BPMN (NB. : the used version of BPMN is 1.2, since the coming major revision, version 2.0, is still in progress).

In future posts, we will give deeper details on those elements:

• Flow Objects
  • Events,
  • Activities,
  • Gateways
• Connecting Objects
  • Sequence Flow,
  • Message Flow,
  • Association
• Swim lanes
  • Pool,
  • Lane
• Artifacts
  • Data Object,
  • Group,
  • Annotation

They are the main describing elements within a BPMN process.

Events

They are “things that happen or happened” and according to which we engage or stop activities. They can be catching events or throwing events

We have:

• Start events: all processes have at least one start event. They are “Catching” events
• Intermediate events: They are events happening while executing the process. They can be either
  •  “Catching” inputs for an activity
  •  “Throwing” outputs of an activity
• End events: all processes ends with at least one event. They are “Throwing” events

 Activities

They are either:

Self explaining task with no need for details

Complex processes that can be explain later like a complete process

 

Gateways

They are decision blocks. They help us describe situations where several pathways are possible.

Connecting Objects

They help describe the pathways followed by the processed information between flow objects.

Sequence Flow

Natural pathway linking two flow objects

Message Flow

Dotted arrows indicating the departure or the entrance of a message in a pool (limited scope of a process, cf. below)

Association

Generally used to associate a data object to an activity. It helps also to show the output or the input of a process element (using the direction of an arrow).

Swim lanes

They help group activities depending on their actors.

Pool

Each pool is dedicated for a participant in a process. A participant can be a business entity, or a defined role for example.

Lane

It is a sub-pool for sub-groups of participants or roles.

Artifacts

They are additional objects in a process to give deeper details: like activities’ categories, manipulated objects (data or information) or further process description.

Data Object

Group

Annotation

Useful links and references:

• OMG website: Object Management Group / Business Process Management Initiative. This website is the reference for BPMN specifications.
• FAQ on Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) Information
• BPMN Community: there are interesting tutorials on BPMN, best practices and some work on reference processes.
• BPMN 1.1 Poster
• Some links to blogs : http://www.bpmn-book.com/index.php/blogs
• Available BPMN tools:
  • BizAgi Modeling tool: seems to become the reference. They provide to complete free to use tool (but not fully featured!).
  • Oryx Editor: web-based tool and works best under Firefox (download an embedded version of firefox to get a platform independent tool)
  • ADONIS Community edition: not that simple to use, but it is complete.

Advertisement