Streamlining Workflow Automation with a Model-Based Assistant

Abstract

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) uses automation technologies to imitate business tasks performed by humans. Digital Automation Platforms are extremely useful services that enable developers to connect applications and automate work-flows and Workflow Automation Tools (WATs) offer tremendous advantages in orchestrating tasks and services. Even if the workflow composition in WATs is offered in a low-code fashion, the unsupervised and autonomous execution of the tasks and transactions between various software systems are performed even if they are completely unrelated. For this reason, building workflows and optimizing them can be a difficult and time-consuming task. Since the workflow orchestrates external systems, we cannot assure that the execution will not fail, or that unexpected problems will arise during the evolution of the orchestrated systems. In this paper, we investigate these challenges and open issues related to unsupervised workflow declarations, and we envisage a general approach to assist the workflow definition.