Pool
One participant in a process, such as a company, a customer or a supplier. A pool is a large rectangle with the participant’s name in a band at one end.
Easily confused with
How to read it
BPMN 2.0.2 calls a pool the graphical representation of a participant, which can be a particular company or a general role such as a buyer or seller. A participant’s own process is drawn inside its pool and its sequence flows cannot leave it; participants communicate by message flows between pools. A pool can be left empty, a black box: Politecnico di Milano’s exercise book says this means the participant’s activities are unknown or not relevant. A pool divided into lanes is the familiar swimlane diagram.
Also searched as: bpmn participant, bpmn pool, pool symbol, swimlane pool.
Pool or lane
BPMN groups its elements into swimlanes in two ways, pools and lanes. A pool is a separate participant with its own process; a lane is a division inside one pool. Montali’s slides give customer, supplier and warehouse as examples of pools, and manager, sales department and engineer as examples of lanes.
Look-alikes
A Task is a much smaller box with rounded corners. A UML class box is divided into compartments one above another, where a pool’s name band runs down one end.
Read next
- Next in BPMN symbolsLane (swimlane)A division of a process by who does the work: a role, a department or a system. Lanes are the bands inside a pool, and a process drawn with them is a swimlane diagram.
- The same shape in African flagsFlag of AngolaAngola’s flag is red over black with a yellow emblem in the centre: part of a cogwheel, a machete and a five-pointed star. Its constitution says the red is the blood shed by Angolans under colonial oppression, in the liberation struggle and in defence of the country, and the black is the African continent; the cogwheel stands for workers and industry, the machete for peasants, farming and the armed struggle, the star for international solidarity and progress, and their yellow for the country’s wealth.
More BPMN symbols
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols drawn with lines or squares and rectangles.
Sources
- Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), Version 2.0.2, OMG document formal/2013-12-09, December 2013 (also ISO/IEC 19510), Object Management Group, Section 9.3 and Table 7.1
- Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN): Modeling Exercises, Cinzia Cappiello, Pierluigi Plebani and Monica Vitali, v.1.1, 2016 (CC BY-SA), Politecnico di Milano, Chapter 4, 4.1 Collaboration and pools
- Data and Process Modelling, 8a. BPMN: Basic Modelling, Marco Montali, lecture slides, A.Y. 2014/2015, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Slide 18, Organizational Modeling
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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