Robotic Process Mining: Vision and Challenges

Abstract

Robotic process automation (RPA) is an emerging technology that allows organizations automating repetitive clerical tasks by executing scripts that encode sequences of fine-grained interactions with Web and desktop applications. Examples of clerical tasks include opening a file, selecting a field in a Web form or a cell in a spreadsheet, and copy-pasting data across fields or cells. Given that RPA can automate a wide range of routines, this raises the question of which routines should be automated in the first place. This paper presents a vision towards a family of techniques, termed robotic process mining (RPM), aimed at filling this gap. The core idea of RPM is that repetitive routines amenable for automation can be discovered from logs of interactions between workers and Web and desktop applications, also known as user interactions (UI) logs. The paper defines a set of basic concepts underpinning RPM and presents a pipeline of processing steps that would allow an RPM tool to generate RPA scripts from UI logs. The paper also discusses research challenges to realize the envisioned pipeline.

Candidate Digital Tasks Selection Methodology for Automation with Robotic Process Automation

“…This challenge is not well researched. The identification of candidate tasks for automation via RPA tools is, so far, a largely unexplored problem [33]. A recent study proposed a methodology to analyze UI logs for the purpose to discover routines for RPA [34].…”

Exploring the Challenge of Automated Segmentation in Robotic Process Automation

“…Given a UI log that consists of events including user actions with the same granularity 6 and potentially belonging to different routines, in the RPA domain segmentation is the task of clustering parts of the log together which belong to the same routine. In a nutshell, the challenge is to automatically understand which user actions contribute to which routines, and organize such user actions in well bounded routine traces [2,21].…”

“…On the other hand, following a similar trend that has been occurring in the BPM domain [25], the research on RPA is moving towards the application of intelligent techniques to automate all the steps of a RPA project, as proven by many recent works in this direction (see below). In this context, segmentation can be considered as one of the "hot" key research effort to investigate [2,21].…”

“…Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an automation technology in the field of Business Process Management (BPM) that creates software (SW) robots to replicate rule-based and repetitive tasks (or simply routines) performed by human users in their applications' user interfaces (UIs). A typical routine that can be automated by a SW robot using a RPA tool is transferring data from one system to another via their respective UIs, e.g., copying records from a spreadsheet application into a web-based enterprise information system [21]. In recent years, much progress has been made both in terms of research and technical development on RPA, resulting in many deployments for industrial-oriented services [19,4,17,28].…”

“…Indeed, in presence of UI logs that collect information about several routines, the recorded actions are mixed in some order that reflects the particular order of their execution by the user, making the identification of candidate routines in a UI log a timeconsuming and error-prone task. The challenge to understand which user actions contribute to which routines inside a UI log is known as segmentation [2,21].…”