Just as Bernd says, control is propagated in a chain of responsibility from node to transition to node until a node stops propagating. The latter node will be the wait state. The call stack is: node.execute() | ->node.leave(Transition) | ->transition.take() | ->node.enter() | ->node.execute() As a side note, in jBPM 3 this simple propagation model has indirect recursion and may result in a stack overflow if a wait state is not encountered soon enough. This has been addressed in PVM. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4162160#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...