Decisions and Logic

If you’re used to flowcharting, or are familiar with the richness of BPMN, one of the things you’ll notice is that… we don’t have anything but a rectangle symbol. One of the symbols that is not available is the decision symbol, or diamond shape. It represents a decision point in a process flow. The question, therefore, is: How do I represent this, using UPN?

Decisions

Well, a decision is nothing more than an activity. So in the example below, we “Lookup customer details”. As we do this, we already know whether we’re dealing with an existing or non-existing customer. Basically, we can use the text in the diamond as an outcome of the previous activity.

There are situations where you want to follow a detailed decision tree (using many diamonds). Have a look at the video below, where Walter will describe this with a working model.

Another challenge can be how to represent logic gates. The simplest logic gates are AND and OR. So, after executing activity A you would get 2 flowlines that trigger both activities B AND C. Or: after executing activity A you would get 2 flowlines that trigger either activity B OR C. Whilst this tends to be already pretty technical, you could represent this on business level by joined lines (AND), or separated lines (OR).

Another short video describes how logic gates work within UPN.

Below are a couple of examples of decision and logic diagrams represented in UPN.

Example 1