Ontology-Supported Modeling of Bots in Robotic Process Automation

Abstract

Despite omnipresent digitalization, the infrastructure for information processing in companies often lags years behind. As a result, employees have to compensate for the inadequacies of legacy software and spend their time collecting, copying, and reviewing data spread across multiple applications. Robotic Process Automation can help automate such structured and repetitive tasks by using software robots that mimic the worker’s behavior. However, being mainly driven by industry, no modeling standard or possibilities for interoperability between different RPA vendors exist, which may lead to a vendor lock-in over time, for example. In this paper, we extend the ontology of RPA operations, that comprises conceptualizations for tasks that can be automated by RPA, and apply it for modeling RPA bots in a vendor-independent manner. To this end, a novel platform for modeling conceptual RPA bots and a corresponding prototype are presented, which open up new possibilities when creating and managing RPA bots.