Dipartimento di Ingegneria informatica, automatica e gestionale

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 SWrobots. 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 humanin-the-loop strategy satisfies three relevant non-functional requirements, namely effectiveness, robustness and usability.