Business Process Representation Analysis in the RPA Context.

BPM (Business Process Management) is a set of methodologies used to discover, model, analyze, and improve business processes. These methodologies have produced long standing standards like BPMN, XPDL and BPMN-XML. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platforms deal specifically with process automation - software robots automatically executing business processes instead of human users. A central piece of RPA platforms is the representation (i.e. model and serialization) of an automated business process, so that it can be understood and executed by software machines. However, modern RPA platforms use custom, proprietary representations of processes. Standard representations of processes like XPDL and BPMN-XML could instead offer a wider flexibility and interoperability among RPA platforms. In this paper, we analyze two such standard representations (i.e. serializations) of business processes, XPDL and BPMN-XML, and try to determine which one is the most useful for representing a business process for an RPA platform.