SmartRPA documentation¶

What is SmartRPA¶

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology which automates mouse and keyboard interactions by means of a software (SW) robot to remove intensive routines. The current generation of RPA tools is driven by predefined rules and manual configurations made by expert users rather than automated techniques.

SmartRPA is a cross-platform tool that tackles such issues. It allows to easily record event logs and to automatically generating executable RPA scripts that will drive a SW robots in emulating an observed user behavior (previously recorded in dedicated UI logs) during the enactment of a routine of interest.

Authors¶

SmartRPA has been developed at DIAG, Department of Computer, Control, and Management Engineering Antonio Ruberti in Sapienza University of Rome by:

Simone Agostinelli
Marco Lupia
Andrea Marrella
Massimo Mecella

Contributors¶

La Universidad de Sevilla

Jose Luis Alonso Rocha

Antonio Martinez Rojas

KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt / TH Ingolstadt

Tom Hohenadl

Architecture¶

The architecture of SmartRPA integrates five main SW components.

Key features include:

Action Logger, log user behaviour, take screenshots, tag actions, supports wide range of applications, cross-platform;
Log Processing, generates both CSV and XES event log;
Event abstraction, abstracts events to a higher level;
Process Discovery, selects the most suitable routine variant to automate and generates high-level flowchart diagram, thus skipping completely the manual modeling activity;
Decision Points, discover differencies between multiple traces in a process and build a new routine based on user decisions;
RPA, implements and enacts a SW robot emulating a routine reflecting the observed behavior (either the most frequent one or the one based on decision points). Available both as a cross-platform Python script and as a UiPath project.

A list of events supported by the Action Logger is available in SmartRPA_events.pdf.

Installation and execution ¶

Download ¶

Links¶

Source code is available on GitHub.
The associated papers are available here:
1. Agostinelli S., Lupia M., Marrella A., Mecella M.: Reactive Synthesis of Software Robots in RPA from User Interface Logs. Accepted at Computers in Industry (Elsevier), 2022
2. Agostinelli, S., Lupia, M., Marrella, A., Mecella, M.: Automated Generation of Executable RPA Scripts from User Interface Logs. In: 18th Int. Conf. on Business Process Management (RPA Forum). pp. 116-131, 2020
3. Agostinelli, S., Lupia, M., Marrella, A., Mecella, M.: SmartRPA: A Tool to Reactively Synthesize Software Robots from User Interface Logs. In: 33rd Int. Conf. on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE Forum). pp. 137-145, 2021
  - The synthetic UI logs generated for the test are available at: https://tinyurl.com/yyk68psx.
  - The complete results can be analyzed at: https://tinyurl.com/y55v56qa.
A screencast of the tool is available on Vimeo.

Contents¶

Main

Main

Utils

Utils