Participants represent companies, departments, or roles and are
represented in collaboration and process diagrams as swimming pools. Lanes represent
sub-entities within these organizations and appear as swimlanes inside the pool. These
objects can also appear in conversation diagrams as square nodes and in choreography
diagrams, where they do not have a separate symbol but are displayed on the top or bottom
band of the choreography task symbol.
To create a new participant, select the
Organization Unit Swimlane tool and click in empty space in a
collaboration diagram. A participant is created containing a single lane and an
associated process, which willl contain all the events, activities, gateways, data, and
flows created in the participant.
Note: In BPMN Descriptive, events, activities,
gateways, data, and flows are created at the model root.
To add further lanes
to a participant, click on it with the
Organization Unit
Swimlane tool. To create an additional participant in the diagram, click
in empty space. Lanes are strongly associated with their parent pools, and cannot be
dragged away from them or reused in other pools.
Note: In BPMN
Descriptive, you can drag lanes from one pool to another, or into empty space to
create a new pool, and a single lane can be reused and appear in multiple different
pools.
Participants and lanes are based on standard BPM organization units (see
Organization Units ( BPM)). Participants have the
following additional property: