1,721,050 research outputs found
Balancing Autonomy and Trust to Enable Intelligent Robotic Process Automation
Full text linkRobotic Process Automation (RPA) is a maturing technology that sits between the fields of Business Process Management (BPM) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). RPA allows organizations to automate high-volume and repetitive tasks performed by human operators. These tasks are enacted using a software (SW) robot that works on the applications’ user interfaces (UIs) as the original human operators did. The current generation of RPA tools is driven by predefined rules and manual configurations made by expert users rather than intelligent solutions, making the current practice time-consuming and error-prone. In this talk, we focus on a recent line of research devoted to leveraging the combined use of process mining and reasoning about actions in AI to evolve RPA from a mere automated technology to a (framed) autonomous solution capable of complex decision-making activities. In this journey, we also conceptualize the notion of trust between humans and SW robots by discussing the research challenges to pioneer new trust-aware solutions that work in partnership with the human workforce and strike the right balance of autonomy and trust for achieving intelligent RPA
Business Process Management Workshops - BPM 2021 International Workshops, Rome, Italy, September 6-10, 2021, Revised Selected Papers.
No full textThe International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM) was established about 19 years ago as the conference where people from academia and industry meet and discuss the latest developments in the area of business process management. In 2021, the conference was organized in Rome, Italy. This year’s BPM also featured eight different workshops, selected after a thorough evaluation phase, which provided a forum for novel research ideas.
Workshops were held on September 6, 2021, right before the main conference.
While the main conference was meant to present finished research, the workshops were meant to discuss research that is still in progress. Each of the workshops focused on particular aspects of business process management. These proceedings present the work that was discussed during the workshops. In total, the BPM 2021 workshops were able to attract 60 submissions. 31 full papers were accepted for publication, leading to an overall acceptance rate of 51.6%. The resulting workshop programs were complemented by many keynote talks from renowned experts. Two of them have been included in these proceedings as invited papers. BPM 2021 featured the following workshops:
• 5th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Business Process Management (AI4BPM 2021)
• 17th International Workshop on Business Process Intelligence (BPI 2021)
• 9th International Workshop on DEClarative, DECision and Hybrid approaches to processes (DEC2H 2021)
• 14th International Workshop on Social and Human Aspects of Business Process Management (BPMS2 2021)
• 1st International Workshop on BPM Governance for and Beyond Digital Transformation (BPMGOV 2021)
• The Fourth Workshop on Security and Privacy-enhanced Business Process Management (SPBP 2021)
• 5th International Workshop on Business Processes Meet the Internet-of-Things
(BP-Meet-IoT 2021)
• 1st International Workshop on Business Process Management and Routine Dynamics (BPM&RD 2021)
As in previous years, the BPM workshop proceedings are post-proceedings. We are
confident that this process of selection, presentation, and revision has led to a collection
of high-quality papers. We hope that the reader will enjoy this volume and find some
inspiration for future work
Intelligent Robotic Process Automation: Generating Executable RPA Scripts from Unsegmented UI Logs
Full text linkRobotic Process Automation (RPA) is an automation technology that sits between the fields of Business Process Management (BPM) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that creates software (SW) robots to partially or fully automate rule-based and repetitive tasks (or simply routines) performed by human users in their applications’ user interfaces (UIs). RPA tools are able to capture in dedicated UI logs the execution of many routines of interest. A UI log consists of user actions that are mixed in some order that reflects the particular order of their execution by the user, thus potentially belonging to different routines. When considering state-of-the-art RPA technology in the BPM domain, it becomes apparent that the current generation of RPA tools is driven by predefined rules and manual configurations made by expert users rather than intelligent techniques. In this paper, we discuss our research targeted at injecting intelligence into RPA practices. Specifically, we present an approach to: (i) automatically understand which user actions contribute to which routines inside a UI log (this issue is known as segmentation) and (ii) automatically generate executable RPA scripts directly from the UI logs that record the user interactions with the SW applications involved in a routine execution, thus skipping completely the (manual) modeling activity of the flowchart diagrams
Applications of Automated Planning for Business Process Management
Full text linkThis is a brief summary of the applications of automated planning in the field of Business Process Management (BPM); and accompanies a tutorial with the same theme at the 19th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2021). We hope that this report is able to quickly onboard newcomers into this field with a broad overview of the associated challenges and opportunities, as well as provide established practitioners in the field some new food for thought in terms of the state-of-the-art and the evolving nature of these problems
A Human Factor Approach to Threat Modeling
Full text linkCybersecurity has many challenges to address to ensure the protection of a system from an attacker. Consequently, strategies have been developed to address a system’s weakness that an attacker may try to exploit. However, while these approaches may prevent an attacker from getting in from the outside, they do not consider the user’s actions from the inside and how their behavior may inadvertently allow an attack to occur. This paper presents a human-centered approach to threat modeling titled STRIDE-HF, which extends the existing threat modeling framework STRIDE
Mastering Robotic Process Automation with Process Mining
Full text linkRobotic Process Automation (RPA) is an emerging automation technology that creates software (SW) robots to partially or fully automate rule-based and repetitive tasks (aka routines) previously performed by human users in their applications’ user interfaces (UIs). Successful usage of RPA requires strong support by skilled human experts, from the detection of the routines to be automated to the development of the executable scripts required to enact SW robots. In this paper, we discuss how process mining can be leveraged to minimize the manual and time-consuming steps required for the creation of SW robots, enabling new levels of automation and support for RPA. We first present a reference data model that can be used for a standardized specification of UI logs recording the interactions between workers and SW applications to enable interoperability among different tools. Then, we introduce a pipeline of processing steps that enable us to (1) semi-automatically discover the anatomy of a routine directly from the UI logs, and (2) automatically develop executable scripts for performing SW robots at run-time. We show how this pipeline can be effectively enacted by researchers/practitioners through the SmartRPA tool
Preface of 22nd International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2024
No full textThis book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2024, which took place in Krakow, Poland, in September 2024.
The 29 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 144 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Foundations; Engineering; and Management
An Interactive Approach to Support Event Log Generation for Data Pipeline Discovery
Full text linkProcess Mining is a discipline that sits between data mining and business process management. The starting point of process mining is an event log, which is analyzed to extract useful insights and recurrent patterns about how processes are executed within organizations. However, often its concrete application is hampered by the considerable preparation effort that needs to be conducted by human experts to collect the required data for building a suitable event log. Instead, event logs need to be extracted from different and heterogeneous data sources, often using customized extraction scripts whose implementation requires both technical and domain expertise. While this is recognized as a relevant issue in the process mining community, literature solutions tend to be ad-hoc for particular application contexts, or not enough structured to be easily applied in practice. In this paper, we tackle this issue by proposing an interactive and general-purpose approach to support organizations in generating simulated event logs that can be employed to discover the structure of the data pipelines executed within a business process. A data pipeline is a composite workflow for processing data that is enacted as part of process execution. To assess the practical applicability of the approach, we show the results of a preliminary evaluation performed in a digital marketing scenario in the range of the recently funded H2020 DataCloud project
HRI Users' Studies in the Context of the SciRoc Challenge: Some Insights on Gender-Based Differences
Full text linkIn this paper, we present the outcomes of the first user study designed and evaluated in the context of the Smart City Robotics Challenge (SciRoc Challenge). The study presented in this paper has the main novelty of having been devised and implemented in a realistic environment: a robot competition where robot tasks were developed by participant teams, robots were fully autonomous, and user questionnaires were part of the competition score. Specifically, our study was performed over a scenario configured to instruct a robot to take an elevator of a shopping mall asking for customers support. Leveraging the dedicated questionnaire designed for the tested scenario, we validated the experimental hypothesis if user perception of robots' behaviour may be influenced by the user's gender. In the end, we discuss the results of our study
SmartRPA: Generating software robots from user interface logs
Full text linkRobotic Process Automation (RPA) is a maturing technology in the field of Business Process Management (BPM) that automates intensive routine tasks previously performed by a human user on the User Interface (UI) of a computer system, by means of a software robot. To date, RPA tools available in the market strongly rely on the ability of human experts to manually implement the routines to automate. This work addresses the limitations of current manual RPA development by introducing SmartRPA, a cross-platform software tool. SmartRPA analyzes UI logs of past routine executions to generate software robots capable of handling intermediate user inputs, thereby reducing development time and error rates
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