Chapter 4 Building Business Process Diagrams

Role Associations (BPM)

A role association is a relationship that describes an interaction between a process and an organization unit displayed as an actor.

A role association can be created in a top-level diagram (see Top-Level Diagram Basics) with any of the following target languages:

Orchestration languages (BPEL4WS and WS-BPEL only)
Collaborative languages

A role association can have the following roles:

Initiating role – drawn from an organization unit to a process
Responding role – drawn from the process to the organization unit

If the orientation of the role association is not displayed, you can modify the role association display preferences, by selecting Tools→Display Preferences→Role Association command (see "Role association display preferences" in the Customizing the BPM environment chapter).

In the following example, the Buyer interacts with the top-level process via an initiating role, and the top-level process interacts with the Carrier and the Provider via responding roles:

Top-level diagram restrictions
Role associations are not allowed in decomposed processes of top-level diagrams associated with BPEL languages or ebXML. For more information (see Top-Level Diagram Basics).