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Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an emerging technology that allows organizations to automate intensive repetitive tasks (or simply routines) previously performed by a human user on the User Interface (UI) of web or desktop applications. RPA tools are able to capture in dedicated UI logs the execution of several routines and then emulate their enactment in place of the user by means of a software (SW) robot. A UI log can record information about many routines, whose actions are mixed in some order that reflects the particular order of their execution by the user, making their automated identification far from being trivial. The issue to automatically understand which user actions contribute to a specific routine inside the UI log is also known as segmentation. In this paper, we leverage a concrete use case to explore the issue of segmentation of UI logs, identifying all its potential variants and presenting an up-to-date overview that discusses to what extent such variants are supported by existing literature approaches. Moreover, we offer points of reference for future research based on the findings of this paper.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) operates on the user interface (UI) of software applications and automates - by means of a software (SW) robot - mouse and keyboard interactions to remove intensive routine tasks (or simply routines). With the recent advances in Artificial Intelligence, the automation of routines is expected to undergo a radical transformation. Nonetheless, to date, the RPA tools available in the market are not able to automatically learn to automate such routines, thus requiring the support of skilled human experts that observe and interpret how routines are executed on the UIs of the applications. Being the current practice time-consuming and error-prone, in this paper we present SmartRPA, a cross-platform tool that tackles such issues by exploiting UI logs to automatically generate executable RPA scripts that automate the routines enactment by SW robots.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a fast-emerging automation technology in the field of Artificial Intelligence that allows organizations to automate high volume routines. RPA tools are able to capture the execution of such routines previously performed by a human user on the interface of a computer system, and then emulate their enactment in place of the user. In this paper, after an in-depth experimentation of the RPA tools available in the market, we developed a classification framework to categorize them on the basis of some key dimensions. Then, starting from this analysis, we derived four research challenges necessary to inject intelligence into current RPA technology.