Generating Executable Robotic Process Automation Scripts from Unsegmented User Interface Logs

This book is a revised version of the PhD dissertation written by the author at Sapienza Università di Roma in Italy.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an automation technology in the field of BPM that creates software robots to automate rule-based and repetitive tasks performed by human users in their applications' user interfaces (UIs). The research underlying this thesis is targeted to: (i) automatically understand which user actions contribute to which routines inside a UI log and (ii) automatically generate executable RPA scripts directly from the UI logs. To this end, a cross-platform software tool called smartRPA was developed, which is able to generate executable RPA scripts, and then validated on four non-functional requirements to measure the quality of the underlying approach.

In 2023, the PhD dissertation won the BPM Dissertation Award, granted to outstanding PhD theses in the field of Business Process Management.

Received the BPM 2023 Dissertation award for an outstanding thesis in the field of business process management Applies principles, methods and techniques in robotic process automation Introduces SmartRPA, a tool to generate RPA scripts from UI logs

Inhalt

1) Introduction.- 2) Background.- 3) Segmentation in RPA.- 4) Segments Discovery through Frequent-Pattern Identification.- 5) Human-in-the-loop Interaction through SCAN.- 6) Routine Traces Detection through Trace Alignment.- 7) SmartRPA: Automated Generation of SW Robots.- 8) Realizing and Evaluating SmartRPA.- 9) Conclusion.