Andres Jimenez Ramirez

• PhD
• Lecturer at University of Seville

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) enables subject matter experts to use the graphical user interface as a means to automate and integrate systems. This is a fast method to automate repetitive, mundane tasks. To avoid constructing a software robot from scratch, Task Mining approaches can be used to monitor human behavior through a series of timestamp...

User Interface (UI) logs are crucial in capturing and analyzing user behavior, enabling a comprehensive understanding of business processes and eventual process automation with Robotic Process Automation (RPA). However, extracting meaningful insights from UI logs becomes challenging, especially when dealing with complex and information-dense graphi...

The robotic process automation (RPA) paradigm is a discipline that is becoming increasingly popular thanks to the great interest shown by the industry. In such context, RPA solutions based on artificial intelligence, i.e., cognitive solutions, are receiving increasing attention. In a cognitive RPA project, the RPA developer is in charge of selectin...

Automating organizational processes typically involves document processing techniques for a large document set. For that purpose, the Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) paradigm has been studied for decades. With the fast emergence of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the process automation landscape, the industrial solution of IDP with RPA in...

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 r...

Recent studies show that the success rate of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) projects is between 50 and 70%. In cases where they are not successful, most failures are caused by organizational factors, i.e., people and their social environment. People in the organization have a significant influence on the success of a RPA project. Likewise, the im...

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a technology that is presented as a universal tool that solves major problems of modern businesses. It aims to reduce costs, improve quality and create customer value. However, the business reality differs from this aspiration. After interviews with managers, we found that implementation of robots does not always...

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) provides a means to automate mundane and repetitive human tasks. Task Mining approaches can be used to discover the actions that humans take to carry out a particular task. A weakness of such approaches, however, is that they cannot deal well with humans who carry out the same task differently for different cases ac...

After the initial hype on RPA, companies have more realistic expectations of this technology. Its current mature vision relegates the end-to-end robotic automation to a less suitable place and considers the human-robot collaboration as the most natural way for automating robotic processes in real-world settings. This hybrid RPA implies a vertical s...

SofIA is a tool that help software developers to apply the MDE paradigm for agile development of software systems

This plugin for DrawIO allows to apply MDE techniques for software prototypes

La Universidad de Sevilla, en su compromiso con la mejora continua de la docencia, viene poniendo en marcha periódicamente un "Programa de Formación e Innovación Docente del Profesorado" (Programa FIDOP) en el marco de su Plan Propio de Docencia. Dicho programa tiene por objeto la formación y la innovación para la adquisición y el perfeccionamiento...

Editorial Novelty in Web Engineering arises when this area is jointly applied with other emerging and innovative ones. The transference of Web Engineering research results to industrial applications is quick due to the extensive domains of applications that this area of knowledge has. Each year there are more and more users appealing for it. Conseq...

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has quickly evolved from automating simple rule-based tasks. Nowadays, RPA is required to mimic more sophisticated human tasks, thus implying its combination with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, i.e., the so-called intelligent RPA. Putting together RPA with AI leads to a challenging scenario since (1) it in...

Automating business processes is one of the most recurrent topics in industries, independent of its digital orientation. Competitiveness pushes companies to deliver their products or services efficiently and effectively.

This work has been motivated by the needs we discovered when analyzing real-world processes from the healthcare domain that have revealed high flexibility demands and complex temporal constraints. When trying to model these processes with existing languages, we learned that none of the latter was able to fully address these needs. This motivated us...

This book constitutes selected papers of the Second International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications, CHIRA 2018, held in Seville, Spain, in September 2018, and Third International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications, CHIRA 2019, held in Vienna, Austria, in September 2019. The 7 full p...

Nowadays, Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are being widely applied in virtually all possible scenarios. However, developing a ML project entails the effort of many ML experts who have to select and configure the appropriate algorithm to process the data to learn from, between other things. Since there exist thousands of algorithms, it becomes a ti...

Changes and continuous progress in logistics and productive systems make the realization of improvements in decision making necessary. Simulation is a good support tool for this type of decisions because it allows reproducing processes virtually to study their behavior, to analyze the impact of possible changes or to compare different design altern...

Web engineering is aligned with the undergoing evolution of modern web applications which have higher user expectations and demands than ever before. Thus, the ability of developers to adopt new advanced practices could be the difference between success and failure.This special issue addresses a set of advanced practices that we consider most relev...

Robotic process automation (RPA) has received increasing attention in recent years. It enables task automation by software components, which interact with user interfaces in a similar way to that of humans. An RPA project life cycle is closely resembling a software project one. However, in certain contexts (e.g., business process outsourcing), a te...

The automation of robotic processes has been experiencing an increasing trend of interest in recent times. However, most of literature describes only theoretical foundations on RPA or industrial results after implementing RPA in specific scenarios, especially in finance and outsourcing. This paper presents a systematic mapping study with the aim of...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Blockchain and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Forum which was held as part of the 18th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2020. The conference was planned to take place in Seville, Spain, in September 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference took place virtually. The...

The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) paradigm has received increasing attention in recent years. It enables task automation by software components which interact with user interfaces in a similar way to that of humans. An RPA project follows a similar lifecycle as a software project. However, in certain contexts (e.g., business process outsourcing,...

The robotic automation of processes is of much interest to organizations. A common use case is to automate the repetitive manual tasks (or processes) that are currently done by back-office staff through some information system (IS). The lifecycle of any Robotic Process Automation (RPA) project starts with the analysis of the process to automate. Th...

Nowadays, Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are being widely applied in virtually all possible scenarios. However, developing a ML project entails the effort of many ML experts who have to select and configure the appropriate algorithm to process the data to learn from, between other things. Since there exist thousands of algorithms, it becomes a ti...

Process-aware information systems (PAISs) are increasingly used to provide flexible support for business processes. The support given through a PAIS is greatly enhanced when it is able to provide accurate time predictions which is typically a very challenging task. Predictions should be (1) multi-dimensional and (2) not based on a single process in...

Los futuros profesionales del área de Ingeniería Informática deben ser capaces de desenvolverse satisfactoriamente en un conjunto de competencias genéricas y específicas. Durante sus estudios, los estudiantes desarrollan estas competencias, dando más importancia a las que consideran que les serán de más utilidad. Sin embargo, puede que algunas comp...

The Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) has been used in recent years to promote better results in the development of Web Applications, in the field that has been called Model-Driven Web Engineering (MDWE). One of the advantages of applying MDWE is that it offers a solution to reduce the cost of the tests without affecting their quality execution. This...

For more than a decade, the interest in aligning information systems in a process-oriented way has been increasing. To enable operational support for business processes, the latter are usually specified in an imperative way. The resulting process models, however, tend to be too rigid to meet the flexibility demands of the actors involved. Declarati...

Within the development of software systems, the development of web applications may be one of the most widespread at present due to the great number of advantages they provide such as: multiplatform, speed of access or the not requiring extremely powerful hardware among others. The fact that so many web applications are being developed, makes enorm...

The need of making improvements in obtaining (in a non-invasive way) and monitoring the breathing rate parameters in a patient emerges due to (1) the great amount of breathing problems our society suffer, (2) the problems that can be solved, and (3) the methods used so far. Non-specific machines are usually used to carry out these measures or simpl...

In this work, an automatic and intelligent system for integrated healthcare processes management is developed on a constraint based system. This project has been carried out in collaboration with a real assisted reproduction clinic. Our goal is to improve the efficiency of the clinic by facilitating the management of the integrated healthcare syste...

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is a recent paradigm emerging from Artificial Intelligence, where computers are used as proactive tools assisting people with their day-to-day activities, making everyone’s life more comfortable. Another main concern of AmI originates from the human computer interaction domain and focuses on offering ways to interact with...

When designing an imperative business process (BP) model, analysts have to face many design requirements (e.g., managing uncertainty, optimizing conflicting objective functions). To facilitate such design, declarative BP models are increasingly used. However, how to execute a given declarative model can be quite challenging since there are typicall...

In order to be able to flexibly adjust a company's business processes (BPs) there is an increasing interest in flexible process-aware information systems (PAISs). This increasing flexibility, however, typically implies decreased user guidance by the PAIS and thus poses significant challenges to its users. As a major contribution of this work, we pr...

Managing large collections of business process (BP) models is increasingly being necessary for organizations. For this, configurable BP models can be used for managing these BPs while allowing analysts to understand what these BPs share and what their differences are. Before the execution of the configurable BP model, a BP model has to be selected...

Unlike imperative models, the specification of business process (BP) properties in a declarative way allows the user to specify what has to be done instead of having to specify how it has to be done, thereby facilitating the human work involved, avoiding failures, and obtaining a better optimization. Frequently, there are several enactment plans re...

Declarative business process (BP) models are increasingly used allowing their users to specify what has to be done instead of how. Due to their flexible nature, there are several enactment plans related to a specific declarative model, each one presenting specific values for different objective functions, e.g., completion time or profit. In this wo...

Business process (BP) models are usually defined manually by business analysts through imperative languages considering activity properties, constraints imposed on the relations between the activities as well as different performance objectives. Furthermore, allocating resources is an additional challenge since scheduling may significantly impact B...

The manual specification of imperative business process (BP) models can be very complex and time-consuming, potentially leading to non-optimized models or even errors. To support process analysts in the definition of these models, a method for generating optimized configurable BP models from a constraint-based specification by considering multiple...

The verification of the properties of a business process (BP) has become a significant research topic in recent years. In the early stages of development, the BP model (e.g. BPMN, EPC), the BP contract (task contract, regulations and laws, business rules), and the test objectives (requirements) are the only elements available. In order to support t...

Several reports indicate that the highest business priorities include: business improvement, security, and IT man- agement. The importance of security and risk management is gaining that even government statements in some cases have imposed the inclusion of security and risk management within business management. Risk assessment has become an essen...