BPMN - a brief description

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a graphical language for representing business processes in a business process model by OMG (object management group). BPMN proposes symbols and conventions that enable the user to model business processes and workflows and document information about current or proposed businesses.

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a standard for business process modelling that provides a graphical notation for specifying business processes in a Business Process Diagram (BPD), based on common flowcharting technique similar in other diagram languages. Using BPMN allows both technical and business users to simultaneously understand a graphical representation of the business processes in standardised form and find areas in the business model that could use improvement or remodelling. BPMN helps bridge the common communication gap between business process design and implementation.

Types of BPMN sub-model:

Business process modeling is used to communicate a wide variety of information to a wide variety of audiences. There are three basic types of sub-models within an end-to-end BPMN model:

Private (internal) business processes
Private business processes are internal to a specific organisation, generally called workflow. The Sequence Flow of the Process is constrained to a single Pool without crossing its boundaries. Only Message Flows can trespass the Pool boundary to show the interactions with other private business processes.

Abstract (public) processes
This represents the interactions between a private business process and another process or participant. Only those activities that communicate outside the private business process are included in the abstract process. Private activities are not shown in the publc process.

Collaboration (global) processes
the interactions now take place between two or more business entities. These interactions are defined as a sequence of activities that represent the message exchange patterns between the entities involved.

As a universal notation for process modelling, BPMN uses common elements to represent the interactions and information flows in its graphical representations. They are split into 5 categories:

Flow objects: Events, activities, gateways

Data Objects: data input, data output, singular and collective representation of data, data storage and message

Connecting objects:  Sequence flow, message flow, association
Swim lanes: Pool, lane
Artifacts: group, annotation (some authors include data objects within this category).

Connection Objects in BPMN

Types of Gateway, a category of flow objects