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Swimlanes


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):
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:

Swimlane settings

To open the swimlane settings window, either double-click on its header or its border, or select the respective item in the swimlane context menu.
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