BPMN Modeling Challenge: Handling an Interruption During Meal Preparation

[sarahekelley]

Hi everyone -

I host bi-weekly process modeling office hours for my team, and this scenario came up as an off-shoot of a discussion we were having about event subprocesses. I didn’t have an immediate, elegant solution come to mind, so I thought I would turn to this forum to gather more expert insights.

The Scenario

The main process involves:
Start Event: Hunger Noticed
End Event: Hunger Satisfied
Main Activities:
Select Recipe
Prepare Meal
Eat Meal

While selecting a recipe or preparing the meal, an external event occurs: a dinner invitation from a friend. This triggers a decision:

• If you accept the invitation:
  • Clean up any in-progress meal preparation
  • Go to dinner with your friend
• If you decline the invitation:
  • Resume the in-progress meal preparation

My Modeling Challenge

I want to model this scenario clearly and concisely in BPMN, but I’m finding it tricky to represent:

The interruption occurring during either “Select Recipe” or “Prepare Meal”
The conditional resumption of meal prep if the invitation is declined
The overall flow in a clean and maintainable way

But I’d love to see how others would tackle this!

[Niall]

There are two options that come to mind, one with an event sub process and one without.

Without an event sub process:

The one With an event sub process

[GotnOGuts]

I was thinking similar thoughts, but was considering using Compensation events.