Swimlanes are horizontal or vertical lines drawn on a workflow-type diagram that enable you to model the part of an organization that things (such as events, processes, actions, or results) happen in.

In System Architect, you can draw swimlanes on Process Charts, Process Map diagrams, IDEF3 process models (see Modeling processes with IDEF3), Flow diagrams for the Application Model, and UML Activity diagrams.

The definition behind a swimlane is an organizational unit (see Organizational Units in enterprise architecture modeling). An Organizational Unit contains a list of Roles performed within that unit. For example, a n Organizational Unit could be a department of your enterprise such as Sales, Resources and Management, or Reception. Roles within the Sales organizational unit might be Account Manager, Telemarketer, Regional Manager, Sales Engineer, etc.

Swimlanes enable you to show how individual processes relate to the roles or Organizational Units that carry them out. They communicate the relationship between a process and the role or entity responsible for it.

You can turn swimlanes on or off by opening the Diagram Properties (select Edit, Diagram, or right-click on the diagram workspace and select Diagram Properties) of the diagram (see list of diagrams supporting swimlanes above), and select or clear Swimlane selections (generally, horizontal or vertical). When you create a new Process Chart or Process Map diagram, System Architect creates a single Swimlane automatically. If you do not want to use swimlanes, you can delete this first swimlane, and turn off swimlanes in diagram properties.