A tool-supported method to generate User Interface logs

Abstract

The rise of robotic process automation (RPA) fuels areas like robotic process mining and task mining. Although traditional process mining research can exploit a range of resources (i.e., event logs) to test and benchmark new techniques, that is not the case for robotic process mining. Moreover, benchmark data for RPA needs to incorporate detailed references and properties to elements of the graphical user interface that a software robot is intended to interact with. Therefore, it is not feasible to create such data by hand. To address this omission, the current paper proposes a tool-supported method to generate synthetic event logs for evaluating RPA techniques. To mimic real-life scenarios closely, these logs can be tailored to incorporate variations along a wide range of dimensions. As an application example of the method, the paper describes a case generator tool, which is publicly available, that can be used to benchmark robotic process mining proposals. We also elaborate on further applications of the method in ways that are beneficial to the BPM and RPA communities.