Executions are structured as a tree, so calling findActiveExecutionIn() will produce results if somewhere down the road there's a fork. So, for most of the use cases you are right. It makes the most sense on the process instance for end-users. However, perhaps power-users could find a usage for querying a subtree of the executions (for performance or something) View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4225844#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...