A Review of Data-driven Robotic Process Automation Exploiting Process Mining

Purpose: Process mining aims to construct, from event logs, process maps that can help discover, automate, improve, and monitor organizational processes. Robotic process automation (RPA) uses software robots to perform some tasks usually executed by humans. It is usually difficult to determine what processes and steps to automate, especially with RPA. Process mining is seen as one way to address such difficulty. This paper aims to assess the applicability of process mining algorithms in accelerating and improving the implementation of RPA, along with the challenges encountered throughout project lifecycles. Methodology: A systematic literature review was conducted to examine the approaches where process mining techniques were used to understand the as-is processes that can be automated with software robots. Eight databases were used to identify papers on this topic. Findings: A total of 19 papers, all published since 2018, were selected from 158 unique candidate papers and then analyzed. There is an increase in the number of publications in this domain. Originality: The literature currently lacks a systematic review that covers the intersection of process mining and robotic process automation. The literature mainly focuses on the methods to record the events that occur at the level of user interactions with the application, and on the preprocessing methods that are needed to discover routines with the steps that can be automated. Several challenges are faced with preprocessing such event logs, and many lifecycle steps of automation project are weakly supported by existing approaches.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, 5 table

Une approche orientée aspect allant du modèle d'exigences au modèle de conception

National audienceDes approches orientées aspects sont aujourd'hui disponibles à chaque phase du développement d'un logiciel : analyse des exigences, conception, ou encore implémentation. Passer d'une phase à l'autre en conservant les aspects identifiés au préalable reste un défi majeur, pourtant peu étudié. Nous proposons dans un article publié à AOSD'11 une approche itérative et dirigée par les préoccupations, permettant de transformer un modèle d'exigences orienté aspect en un modèle de conception lui aussi orienté aspect, et ceci de manière automatique. Cette ap- proche est mise en œuvre en utilisant AoURN ("use case maps") pour le modèle d'exigence et Adore pour le modèle de conception (orchestrations SOA). Elle permet l'encapsula- tion continue des préoccupations identifiées lors des exigences, transformées en artefact de conception. Nous proposons de plus une boucle de rétro-action permettant de remonter dans les modèles d'exigences des défauts constatés dans le modèle de conception, supportant ainsi un processus de développement itératif

A goal-oriented, business intelligence-supported decision-making methodology

In many enterprises and other types of organizations, decision making is both a crucial and a challenging task. Despite their importance, many decisions are still made based on experience and intuition rather than on evidence supported by rigorous approaches. Decisions are often made this way because of lack of data, unknown relationships between data and goals, conflicting goals, and poorly understood risks. This research presents a goal-oriented, business intelligence-supported methodology for decision making. The methodology, which is iterative, allows enterprises to begin with limited data, discover required data to build their models, capture stakeholders goals, and model threats, opportunities, and their impact. It also enables the aggregation of Key Performance Indicators and their integration into goal models. The tool-supported methodology and its models aim to enhance the user's experience with common business intelligence applications. Managers can monitor the impact of decisions on the organization's goals and improve both decision models and business processes. The approach is illustrated and evaluated through a retail business scenario, from which several lessons were learned. One key lesson is that once an organization has a goal model, data can be added iteratively. The example, tool support, and lessons suggest the feasibility of the methodology

A consensus protocol for the recovery of mercury methylation genes from metagenomes

Mercury (Hg) methylation genes (hgcAB) mediate the formation of the toxic methylmercury and have been identified from diverse environments, including freshwater and marine ecosystems, Arctic permafrost, forest and paddy soils, coal-ash amended sediments, chlor-alkali plants discharges and geothermal springs. Here we present the first attempt at a standardized protocol for the detection, identification and quantification of hgc genes from metagenomes. Our Hg-cycling microorganisms in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems (Hg-MATE) database, a catalogue of hgc genes, provides the most accurate information to date on the taxonomic identity and functional/metabolic attributes of microorganisms responsible for Hg methylation in the environment. Furthermore, we introduce "marky-coco", a ready-to-use bioinformatic pipeline based on de novo single-metagenome assembly, for easy and accurate characterization of hgc genes from environmental samples. We compared the recovery of hgc genes from environmental metagenomes using the marky-coco pipeline with an approach based on coassembly of multiple metagenomes. Our data show similar efficiency in both approaches for most environments except those with high diversity (i.e., paddy soils) for which a coassembly approach was preferred. Finally, we discuss the definition of true hgc genes and methods to normalize hgc gene counts from metagenomes

Requirements Engineering for Well-Being, Aging, and Health:An Overview for Practitioners

Well-Being, Aging, and Health (WBAH) are important aspects of life that affect us all. The requirements for WBAH systems have also become a topic of common interest for researchers from different disciplines. This is unsurprising, given that health-related expenses often represent about 10% of a country's gross domestic product, according to the World Health Organizatio

Mercury flux to sediments of Lake Tahoe, California-Nevada

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2009. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Springer for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Water, Air, & Soil Pollution 210 (2010): 399-407, doi:10.1007/s11270-009-0262-y.We report estimates of mercury (Hg) flux to the sediments of Lake Tahoe, California-Nevada: 2 and 15-20 µg/m2/yr in preindustrial and modern sediments, respectively. These values result in a modern to preindustrial flux ratio of 7.5-10, which is similar to flux ratios recently reported for other alpine lakes in California, and greater than the value of 3 typically seen worldwide. We offer plausible hypotheses to explain the high flux ratios, including (1) proportionally less photoreduction and evasion of Hg with the onset of cultural eutrophication and (2) a combination of enhanced regional oxidation of gaseous elemental Hg and transport of the resulting reactive gaseous Hg to the surface with nightly downslope flows of air. If either of these mechanisms is correct, it could lead to local/regional solutions to lessen the impact of globally increasing anthropogenic emissions of Hg on Lake Tahoe and other alpine ecosystems.Funding was provided by Miami University, EPA-STAR, the Postdoctoral Scholar Program at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the USGS

Use Case Maps as a Feature Description Notation

We propose Use Case Maps (UCMs) as a notation for describing features. UCMs capture functional requirements in terms of causal scenarios bound to underlying abstract components. This particular view proved very useful in the description of a wide range of reactive and telecommunications systems. This paper presents some of the most interesting constructs and benefits of the notation in relation to a question on a User Requirements Notation recently approved by ITU-T Study Group 10, which will lead to a new Recommendation by 2003. Tool support, current research on UCMs, and related notations are also discussed