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Ontology-Based Abstraction of Bot Models in Robotic Process Automation

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Conceptual Modeling (ER 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14320))

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Abstract

Robotic Process Automation is a technology for lightweight task automation that empowers business users to build their own software bots by combining predefined operations in a graphical user interface. However, due to the detailed nature of these operations, which are comparable to single code instructions, the graphical models become complex and hard to understand. This complicates the sharing, discussion, and maintenance of these software bots. At the same time, RPA projects typically require extensive documentation of the process and its automation aspects that must be kept in sync during the maintenance phase. This paper presents a foundation for bot model abstraction in RPA that leverages semantic information. It proposes an abstraction method to generate smaller but still expressive bot models in an automated fashion. These abstract bot models can be used for documentation purposes and to foster process understanding, as they convey key activities while hiding operational details that are not relevant to perceiving the overall automation goal.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Due to the lack of a modeling standard in RPA [22], we use BPMN for visualization.

    A high-resolution version can be found here: https://github.com/bptlab/onto-rpa-platform/raw/main/components/abstraction/figures/BotModelExample.svg.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/bptlab/onto-rpa-platform/tree/main/components/abstraction.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Maximilian Völker & Mathias Weske

Authors
  1. Maximilian Völker
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  2. Mathias Weske
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Correspondence to Maximilian Völker .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Federal University of Espírito Santo, Vitória, Brazil

    João Paulo A. Almeida

  2. Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    José Borbinha

  3. University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Giancarlo Guizzardi

  4. University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Sebastian Link

  5. Stockholm University, Kista, Sweden

    Jelena Zdravkovic

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Völker, M., Weske, M. (2023). Ontology-Based Abstraction of Bot Models in Robotic Process Automation. In: Almeida, J.P.A., Borbinha, J., Guizzardi, G., Link, S., Zdravkovic, J. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14320. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47262-6_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47262-6_13

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-47262-6

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