Chapter 8. BPMN2 swimlanes in process designer

Swimlanes are process elements that visually group tasks related to one group or user. You can use user tasks in combination with swimlanes to assign multiple human tasks to the same actor. At run time, swimlanes auto-claim or assign tasks to users who have completed another task in that lane, within the same process instance. When the first task in a swimlane is created, and that task has an actor ID specified, that actor ID is assigned to all other tasks of that swimlane as well. A lane is a sub-partition within a process that enables you to group some process elements and define their common parameters.

In the following example, the Analyst lane has two user tasks:

The Group field in the Update Customer Details and Resolve Customer Issue tasks has the value analyst. When the process is started, and the Update Customer Details task is claimed, started, or completed by an analyst user, the Resolve Customer Issue task is claimed and assigned to the user who completed the first task. However, if only the Update Customer Details task has the analyst group assigned, and the second task had no user or group assignments, the process stops after the first task completes.