ActiveVOS Designer User’s Guide

What is BPMN Style?

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a graph-oriented notation standard favored by business analysts and designers to model the flow of activities for analysis, documentation, and execution.

The BPMN standard, currently in development as version 2.0, is governed by the Object Management Group (OMG).

Like BPEL, BPMN uses shapes, symbols, and connectors. to represent its constructs. Names of constructs include tasks, subprocesses, gateways, events, sequence flows, and others. The shapes, symbols, and connectors have standard usage rules and standardized operational semantics. BPMN also includes extensive annotation and documentation capabilities.

Well-versed BPMN designers will recognize the three main shapes used in ActiveVOS:

Subtypes of these shapes are distinguished by:

Usage Rules for Shapes and Symbols

In BPMN edit style, you may notice that activity icons change their appearance depending on where they are used in a BPEL process: beginning, intermediate, or end. For example, a receive activity that starts a process has a solid border, whereas an intermediate receive in a process has an outlined border.

Receive - start and intermediate

Reply - intermediate and end

Gateway - four types

Pick - start and intermediate On Message

On Alarm - solid vs. dashed border

Special Usage of BPEL and BPMN Constructs

In BPMN style, certain BPEL construct are automatically The following table shows the BPEL constructs hidden and BPMN constructs used in BPMN edit style.

BPEL Construct Hidden in BPMN

BPMN Construct (not included in ActiveVOS Classic style)

Flow

(automatically embedded as applicable)

Fork Join

Sequence

(automatically embedded as applicable)

Gateway

Opaque (not used)

Start/End/None

See also: