Exploring the Challenge of Automated Segmentation in Robotic Process Automation

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.