BPMN2.0 Event Examples

An Event is something that happens during the course of a Process. These Events affect the flow of the Process, usually having a cause or an impact, and in general requiring or allowing for a reaction. For example, the start of an Activity, the end of an Activity, the change of state of a document, or the arrival of a Message could all be considered to be Events.

Events allow for the description of 'event-driven' Processes. In these Processes, there are three main types of Events:

Start Events, which indicate where a Process will start
End Events, which indicate where the path of a Process will end
Intermediate Events, which indicate where something happens between the start and end of a Process

Within these three types, Events can be one of two subtypes:

Events that catch a trigger - all Start Events and some Intermediate Events are catching Events
Events that throw a Result - all End Events and some Intermediate Events are throwing Events that could eventually be caught by another Event

In this section, we provide examples illustrating many of the commonly-used BPMN 2.0 events. In each example, we provide step-by-step BPMN modeling and BPSim configuration instructions, and a thorough analysis of the simulation result. All the examples are available in the EAExample model.