论文标题
Webrobot:使用交互式编程划分的Web机器人过程自动化
WebRobot: Web Robotic Process Automation using Interactive Programming-by-Demonstration
论文作者
论文摘要
必须使机器人过程自动化(RPA)民主化,因为RPA已成为数字化转型的主要驱动力,但在技术上仍然非常要求构建,尤其是对于非专家而言。在本文中,我们研究了如何自动化一系列重要的RPA任务,该任务称为Web RPA,这些任务与构建跨数据和Web浏览器自动化交互的软件机器人有关。我们的主要贡献是双重的。首先,我们建立了正式的基础,该基础允许语义上的Web RPA程序进行推理,并以原则上的方式制定其综合问题。其次,我们根据一种称为投机重写的新想法提出了Web RPA程序综合算法。这导致了一种新颖的推测方法,在基于重写的程序合成的背景下,这也已证明是理论上简单的,并且实际上是从演示中综合程序的效率。我们已经在称为Webrobot的新的交互式合成器中构建了这些想法,并在76个Web RPA基准测试中对其进行了评估。我们的结果表明,Webrobot有效地自动化了其中的大多数。此外,我们表明Webrobot与使用Egg实施的基于常规改写的合成基线相比有利。最后,我们进行了一项小型用户研究,证明Webrobot也是可用的。
It is imperative to democratize robotic process automation (RPA), as RPA has become a main driver of the digital transformation but is still technically very demanding to construct, especially for non-experts. In this paper, we study how to automate an important class of RPA tasks, dubbed web RPA, which are concerned with constructing software bots that automate interactions across data and a web browser. Our main contributions are twofold. First, we develop a formal foundation which allows semantically reasoning about web RPA programs and formulate its synthesis problem in a principled manner. Second, we propose a web RPA program synthesis algorithm based on a new idea called speculative rewriting. This leads to a novel speculate-and-validate methodology in the context of rewrite-based program synthesis, which has also shown to be both theoretically simple and practically efficient for synthesizing programs from demonstrations. We have built these ideas in a new interactive synthesizer called WebRobot and evaluate it on 76 web RPA benchmarks. Our results show that WebRobot automated a majority of them effectively. Furthermore, we show that WebRobot compares favorably with a conventional rewrite-based synthesis baseline implemented using egg. Finally, we conduct a small user study demonstrating WebRobot is also usable.