Swimlanes are BPMN elements used to separate and organize activities by participants. Each swimlane represents a process participant, e.g. an employee or a department. When a swimlane is allocated to a participant, they become responsible for the activities and events placed in the swimlane.
Roles are assigned to swimlanes and determine which members of your business organization are responsible for performing the work. You can define performers in swimlane settings by selecting job positions from the organizational structure or business roles.
Swimlanes, as graphic elements, can represent any process participant, for example, an employee, customer, vendor, representative of an external organization. Thus, the swimlanes are not only used to allocate responsibilities within the business process, but also to make graphical model more readable and informative.
Fig. 1. Process swimlanes represent the Initiator and the Project Manager.
Swimlanes Types
There are four types of swimlanes; you can distinguish them on the graphic model by the color of their headers (fig.2):
Static - The the responsible user does not change during the entire process. In the graphic model such swimlanes are grey.
Dynamic - The the responsible user is determined during the execution of the process instance. In the graphic model such swimlanes are green.
Dynamic (defined by script) - The the responsible user is defined by a script. In the graphic model such swimlanes are blue.
Business role - A dynamic swimlane that is used to model document routing processes; can contain only document management elements. In the graphic model such swimlanes are turquoise.
Fig.2. Swimlane types, colors of the swimlane headers.
Swimlanes can be positioned vertically or horizontally. One model can have both horizontal and vertical swimlanes.
Creating swimlanes
You can create a swimlane using one of the following methods:
