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Primary Building Blocks for Web Automation

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Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2023 (WISE 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14306))

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Abstract

Current RPA (Robotic Process Automation) platforms increase the efficiency of business processes by automatically executing them better and faster than the human users do. They require the human user to analyze the UI of the target application, to identify important UI controls and to program all these UI controls together with some control instructions into an automatic workflow that can be later executed by the RPA agent. We introduce a semi-automated tool based on a browser plugin, which can be used to discover basic business processes in business web applications, construct more complex business processes based on these and execute them automatically later. The central idea of our tool is to map UI operations in the target business web application to conceptual operations in a database. The advantage of our tool is that it can be used by users without programming skills, in contrast to current RPA platforms. Our web automation tool was successfully evaluated on three commercial, business web applications.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/dynamics-crm-2016-dynamics-365.

  2. 2.

    https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/business-central/overview/.

  3. 3.

    https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira.

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Acknowledgement

The present work has received financial support through the project: Integrated system for automating business processes using artificial intelligence, POC/163/1/3/121075 - a Project Cofinanced by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Competitiveness Operational Programme 2014–2020.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Adrian Sterca, Virginia Niculescu, Maria-Camelia Chisăliţă-Creţu & Cristina-Claudia Osman

Authors
  1. Adrian Sterca
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  2. Virginia Niculescu
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  3. Maria-Camelia Chisăliţă-Creţu
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  4. Cristina-Claudia Osman
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Adrian Sterca .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

    Feng Zhang

  2. Victoria University, Footscray, VIC, Australia

    Hua Wang

  3. Qatar University, Doha, Qatar

    Mahmoud Barhamgi

  4. Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Australia

    Lu Chen

  5. Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Australia

    Rui Zhou

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Sterca, A., Niculescu, V., Chisăliţă-Creţu, MC., Osman, CC. (2023). Primary Building Blocks for Web Automation. In: Zhang, F., Wang, H., Barhamgi, M., Chen, L., Zhou, R. (eds) Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2023. WISE 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14306. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7254-8_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7254-8_29

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-99-7253-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-99-7254-8

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