Home > BPMN Concepts > BPMN and Process Modeling
Many important aspects of modeling a process are not standardized by BPMN. These include resource characteristics and allocation, transaction interaction, resource contention, scheduling, and any details about how work is done at an activity or modeling its behavior. iGrafx, however, has the capability to model all these behaviors. As a result, BPMN-specified behaviors are a subset of the overall iGrafx modeling environment.
iGrafx supports most BPMN behavior and conventions in process diagrams and models through features such as
Floating swimlanes (representing pools in BPMN)
Container shapes (representing embedded subprocesses)
Exceptions (representing boundary events on activities)
Connector lines that terminate on swimlane boundaries (representing messages)
In simulation of Process type diagrams, a transaction is said to duplicate when multiple paths of execution exit an activity, and the transactions on the separate paths are called family members. In BPMN, the separate family members are called tokens or threads of execution. As such, BPMN handles the merging and synchronization of separate transactions that are family members.
BPMN does not address the interaction of unrelated transactions (called process instances in BPMN) in the process, so the concepts of batch, group, and non-by-family-join, all of which address interactions among separate transactions or transaction families, are not part of BPMN. In iGrafx simulation terms, you may want to think about token (transaction) flow in BPMN as if the only kind of generator in BPMN were a completion generator; the process is only concerned about one transaction family at a time.
Process modeling and simulation can be very useful, however, when considering resource usage and how multiple transactions proceed through a process together. So while BPMN modeling only considers a single initiating transaction at a time, the combination of BPMN with process modeling and simulation in iGrafx provides the best of both worlds.
Two important BPMN concepts in iGrafx are
Related Topics