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I have been tasked with creating a flow chart for some client server and start up processes in our organizations software. A lot of our processes run concurrently as they have no impact on one another. How is this traditionally represented in the flow chart?

Dabloons
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  • Check this the links http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1643733/how-to-illustrate-multiple-threads-in-sequence-diagram or http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/120859/uml-diagrams-of-multi-threaded-applications helps – Kalyanaraman Santhanam Dec 12 '14 at 02:40

2 Answers2

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I was thinking that flowcharts aren't really intended for this, but as it turns out, there actually is a notation for concurrency. Wikipedia says:

Concurrency symbol

Represented by a double transverse line with any number of entry and exit arrows. These symbols are used whenever two or more control flows must operate simultaneously. The exit flows are activated concurrently, when all of the entry flows have reached the concurrency symbol. A concurrency symbol with a single entry flow is a fork; one with a single exit flow is a join.

I did some looking around on Google images and found this notation:

Concurrency

But this will only apply for a specific type of parallelism (what if you don't spawn all your threads at once?), and won't apply to a multiprocess model at all. In case of a multiprocess model, I would just make a separate flowchart for each process.

Devsman
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    I read the same Wikipedia article and was asking myself, what a _double traverse line_ would be. My guess: it would rather be something like [this](http://engineeronadisk.com/book_plcs/images/plc_intro13.gif) other than the _process_ of _fork()_ like in your example. – NoRyb Apr 20 '17 at 12:53
  • @Devsman What is a double transverse line! Could anybody show a link to a image! – John Apr 18 '22 at 06:37
  • @NoRyb What is a double transverse line! Could anybody show a link to a image – John Apr 18 '22 at 06:37
  • @John I guess it's not in the linked Wikipedia article anymore but the link in my original comment still shows how multiple paths can end at the same layer (the double line): http://engineeronadisk.com/book_plcs/images/plc_intro13.gif – NoRyb Apr 19 '22 at 08:46
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Examples speak louder than words! See the flow chart in a paper. enter image description here enter image description here

John
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  • @Dabloons How do you think about this answer? And it's rarely seen that a flow chart is used to represent multiple threads. – John Apr 18 '22 at 07:39