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A Human-in-the-Loop Approach to Support the Segments Compliance Analysis

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Business Process Management: Blockchain, Robotic Process Automation, and Central and Eastern Europe Forum (BPM 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 459))

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Abstract

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an emerging automation technology in the field of Business Process Management (BPM) that creates software (SW) robots to partially or fully automate rule-based and repetitive tasks (a.k.a. routines) previously performed by human users in their applications’ user interfaces (UIs). Nowadays, successful usage of RPA requires strong support by skilled human experts, from the discovery of the routines to be automated (i.e., the so-called segmentation issue of UI logs) to the development of the executable scripts required to enact SW robots. In this paper, we present a human-in-the-loop approach to filter out the routine behaviors (a.k.a. routine segments) not allowed (i.e., wrongly discovered from the UI log) by any real-world routine under analysis, thus supporting human experts in the identification of valid routine segments. We have also measured to which extent the human-in-the-loop strategy satisfies three relevant non-functional requirements, namely effectiveness, robustness and usability.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The tool can be downloaded at: https://github.com/bpm-diag/SCAN.

  2. 2.

    The UI logs created by generic action loggers usually consist of low-level events associated one-by-one to a recorded user action on the UI (e.g., mouse clicks, etc.).

  3. 3.

    SCAN can be downloaded at: https://github.com/bpm-diag/SCAN.

  4. 4.

    https://fluxicon.com/disco/.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the H2020 project DataCloud (grant ID 101016835), the Sapienza grant BPbots, by the Italian projects Social Museum and Smart Tourism (CTN01_00034_23154) and RoMA - Resilience of Metropolitan Areas (SCN_00064).

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Agostinelli, S., Acitelli, G., Capece, M., Mecella, M. (2022). A Human-in-the-Loop Approach to Support the Segments Compliance Analysis. In: Marrella, A., et al. Business Process Management: Blockchain, Robotic Process Automation, and Central and Eastern Europe Forum. BPM 2022. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 459. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16168-1_13

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