I found a workaround for this problem. It seems that there is a bug here. If you have a task in the start-state and try to assign it via a swimlane, it will create a swimlane instance that always maps to "manager". For example, if the swimlane name is "shipper" and the actor_id is "shipper in the jbpm_swimlane table, after being invoked in the start-state it will create a swinlane_instance that maps from shipper to manager. All subsequence usage of the shipper swimlane will be assigned to manager. The solution was to create a start-state that does nothing but transition to a task-node with the first task (as opposed to using the start-state for the first take) because assignment in task-nodes seems to be working correctly. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4074235#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...