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Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence in Industry 4.0

TiagoEckhardt 5y ago
Taking into account the technological evolution of the last decades and the proliferation of information systems in society, today we see the vast majority of services provided by companies and institutions as digital services. Industry 4.0 is the fourth industrial revolution where technologies and automation are asserting themselves as major changes.
im_down_w_otp 5y ago
For the uninitiated, the term "Robotic Process Automation" isn't about physical/articulating robots performing tasks that interact with their environment. It's a term used to describe something much more akin to back-office software automation in most cases.
- pantulis 5y ago
  I like to think of it as glorified VBA macros, as most software of this class runs on top of Windows automating desktop apps.
- vorhemus 5y ago
  In my opinion a complete misuse of the term "robotic". Similarly how the term "AI" was (and is) abused by tech companies marketing departments.
  - homarp 5y ago
    robotic as in "resembling or characteristic of a robot, especially in being stiff or unemotional." Basically, it makes it clear that RPA is just macro recording, without any 'subtlety' or margin of errors (one pixel shift will break RPA)
    - joe_the_user 5y ago
      Calling it "macro recording" would make it maximally clear that this was macro recording, I think.
    - T0Bi 5y ago
      But that's just wrong. Most RPA Software (like UiPath) uses selectors for web and desktop automation. You can use static or dynamic selectors, anchors and lots of other techniques to tell the bot where to click/type. It's very dynamic and a well written bot will work even after changes to the website or software. Also, pure RPA is usually only used on legacy software without any other APIs, so they rarely change. Source: RPA/IPA Dev
    - PinkMilkshake 5y ago
      > one pixel shift will break RPA The RPA systems I looked at supported fuzzy matching for images and text.
  - leetrout 5y ago
    I really like IBMs marketing of Watson as cognitive computing / cognitive enhancement / cognitive assistance.
- sircastor 5y ago
  I learned this term when I was looking for roles in the robotics industry. There are lots of RPA jobs that show up when you’re looking for robotics jobs. I didn’t know until your post what it actually was (just what it wasn’t)
karimtr 5y ago
The reality is that RPA, AI, ML, etc ... are still years away when it comes to the industrial sectors (e.g. manufacturing, energy, oil & gas, etc). Sure there are many PoCs, smaller projects, but in my experience, working on data centric projects with a few fortune 500 industrial companies, none of these technologies have been successfully implemented in production. Perhaps for some back office & business-level applications, but certainly not for any production related use-cases (e.g. predictive maintenance).
- pantulis 5y ago
  My take is that RPA by itself is useful as most big companies have mind blowingly manual processes in their back offices (or even worse they don't have mapped their processes). The combination of RPA with AI/ML, usually called "Intelligent Process Automation" is merely dropping some OCR or NLP engine here and there to help in points of the workflow when there is no other possiblity other than some person reading a document and trying to come up with the next step. Calling this "AI" is a stretch.
  - pantulis 5y ago
    Oh and don't get me started with the McKinsey quotes the likes of "workforce doing clerical work will be liberated to do higher value tasks". They are simply going to be fired --if you squint a little while reading the slides you see that is precisely the business case. That's going to be technology for the rest of the office workforce in the next few years.
- jwally 5y ago
  The hardest part of successful RPA implementation IMHO is in not automating stupidity. It’s too easy to send EY or whoever in to replace some god awful process by “Larry in AP” with a “bot” that just replicated what he does - no matter how pointless any step might be.
smarx007 5y ago
I think there is no place for RPA in Industry 4.0 or any kind of high tech architectures (ML/cloud/insert buzzword here). If you are using RPA, it means that your IT infra does not even have (usable) APIs to begin with and you have to resort to mouse-clicking and other hacky approaches offered by RPA. First, get rid of software that holds your data hostage and cannot be controlled via APIs before you start thinking about “AI”. P.S. Congratulations on paper acceptance!
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Well, if you had AI that really was intelligent, it would be cool to have AI agents figure out your repetitive tasks as well as the structure of data in some giant IT app, and then turn this into a better, streamlined and automatable/automated App. The only problem is that AI is nowhere near that now and plausibly won't be there for a while.
- Animats 5y ago
  Right. What is meant here by "Robotic process automation" here is screen scraping in difficult cases. I used to have to do that. Around 1999 I had a nightmare written in Perl which could scrape human-readable financial statements in text or HTML filed with the SEC to extract a few basic numbers. All financial statements have roughly the same data, but they're all formatted differently. I used to have a database with a sizable list of euphemisms for "net loss". For a while, the SEC made companies submit that information in XML, which they did badly. Then the SEC removed that requirement. Then they re-instated it with a better system, which is where everybody gets that data now. It took about 15 years before everybody was on board with this.
- Closi 5y ago
  > First, get rid of software that holds your data hostage and cannot be controlled via APIs before you start thinking about “AI”. The paper is talking about using AI to improve screen-scraping performance for RPA frameworks, which is definitely a valid use case. As nice as it would be to always replace legacy systems with APIs, sometimes you have a job to do and need to get it done! If you are hired to build something and it needs to integrate with some windows application which can only be accessed via Citrix which you are not able to touch, then these tools come into their own (not as the preferred architectural choice, but as the only remaining practical option).
specialist 5y ago
Weird article. Apparently Robotic Process Automation is reducing repetitive tasks. 80+ years into the Information Age. And we're still confused. Automation is not digitization. Most everyone conflates the two. Automation is the removal of human judgement. This generally means simplification. All those biz pop terms like "business process reengineering". Digitization is using computers to do tasks previously performed by humans. IT (data processing) projects that set out to replace legacy systems, whether paper-based or prior software, generally fail. Because they do not first simplify the work being done. But rather attempt to fork lift current work onto a new media. In other words, digitization without prior automation. -- As for the selection of tools listed for Robotic Process Automation, they're fine mitigations. When one cannot or will not first simplify, the minions are reduced to relying on shims and screen scrapping. Ever more, I think most grand efforts like simplification, understanding, semantics, ontologies, and data interchange are quixotic. Just log everything and let future minions ferret out whatever interesting bits they might need. In other words, enable future software systems archaeologists and forensics teams to better mine the data, and don't try to code for the ages.
tuatoru 5y ago
In my Systems Analysis course back in the 1980s, at one point the instructor said something along the lines of "we could just automate the existing processes by taking the existing documents, making digital copies of them, and writing code to analyze them. But no-one would do that, because it's stupid." Here we are.
tejisant01 5y ago
Just one update: Win automation no longer exists. Microsoft transforms it to Power Automate Desktop. Fairly the same thing with some improvements, but not with the flexible that cames around with uipath.

Taking into account the technological evolution of the last decades and the proliferation of information systems in society, today we see the vast majority of services provided by companies and institutions as digital services. Industry 4.0 is the fourth industrial revolution where technologies and automation are asserting themselves as major changes.

im_down_w_otp 5y ago

For the uninitiated, the term "Robotic Process Automation" isn't about physical/articulating robots performing tasks that interact with their environment. It's a term used to describe something much more akin to back-office software automation in most cases.

pantulis 5y ago
I like to think of it as glorified VBA macros, as most software of this class runs on top of Windows automating desktop apps.
vorhemus 5y ago
In my opinion a complete misuse of the term "robotic". Similarly how the term "AI" was (and is) abused by tech companies marketing departments.
- homarp 5y ago
  robotic as in "resembling or characteristic of a robot, especially in being stiff or unemotional." Basically, it makes it clear that RPA is just macro recording, without any 'subtlety' or margin of errors (one pixel shift will break RPA)
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    Calling it "macro recording" would make it maximally clear that this was macro recording, I think.
  - T0Bi 5y ago
    But that's just wrong. Most RPA Software (like UiPath) uses selectors for web and desktop automation. You can use static or dynamic selectors, anchors and lots of other techniques to tell the bot where to click/type. It's very dynamic and a well written bot will work even after changes to the website or software. Also, pure RPA is usually only used on legacy software without any other APIs, so they rarely change. Source: RPA/IPA Dev
  - PinkMilkshake 5y ago
    > one pixel shift will break RPA The RPA systems I looked at supported fuzzy matching for images and text.
- leetrout 5y ago
  I really like IBMs marketing of Watson as cognitive computing / cognitive enhancement / cognitive assistance.
sircastor 5y ago
I learned this term when I was looking for roles in the robotics industry. There are lots of RPA jobs that show up when you’re looking for robotics jobs. I didn’t know until your post what it actually was (just what it wasn’t)

karimtr 5y ago

The reality is that RPA, AI, ML, etc ... are still years away when it comes to the industrial sectors (e.g. manufacturing, energy, oil & gas, etc). Sure there are many PoCs, smaller projects, but in my experience, working on data centric projects with a few fortune 500 industrial companies, none of these technologies have been successfully implemented in production. Perhaps for some back office & business-level applications, but certainly not for any production related use-cases (e.g. predictive maintenance).

pantulis 5y ago
My take is that RPA by itself is useful as most big companies have mind blowingly manual processes in their back offices (or even worse they don't have mapped their processes). The combination of RPA with AI/ML, usually called "Intelligent Process Automation" is merely dropping some OCR or NLP engine here and there to help in points of the workflow when there is no other possiblity other than some person reading a document and trying to come up with the next step. Calling this "AI" is a stretch.
- pantulis 5y ago
  Oh and don't get me started with the McKinsey quotes the likes of "workforce doing clerical work will be liberated to do higher value tasks". They are simply going to be fired --if you squint a little while reading the slides you see that is precisely the business case. That's going to be technology for the rest of the office workforce in the next few years.
jwally 5y ago
The hardest part of successful RPA implementation IMHO is in not automating stupidity. It’s too easy to send EY or whoever in to replace some god awful process by “Larry in AP” with a “bot” that just replicated what he does - no matter how pointless any step might be.

smarx007 5y ago

I think there is no place for RPA in Industry 4.0 or any kind of high tech architectures (ML/cloud/insert buzzword here). If you are using RPA, it means that your IT infra does not even have (usable) APIs to begin with and you have to resort to mouse-clicking and other hacky approaches offered by RPA. First, get rid of software that holds your data hostage and cannot be controlled via APIs before you start thinking about “AI”. P.S. Congratulations on paper acceptance!

joe_the_user 5y ago
Well, if you had AI that really was intelligent, it would be cool to have AI agents figure out your repetitive tasks as well as the structure of data in some giant IT app, and then turn this into a better, streamlined and automatable/automated App. The only problem is that AI is nowhere near that now and plausibly won't be there for a while.
Animats 5y ago
Right. What is meant here by "Robotic process automation" here is screen scraping in difficult cases. I used to have to do that. Around 1999 I had a nightmare written in Perl which could scrape human-readable financial statements in text or HTML filed with the SEC to extract a few basic numbers. All financial statements have roughly the same data, but they're all formatted differently. I used to have a database with a sizable list of euphemisms for "net loss". For a while, the SEC made companies submit that information in XML, which they did badly. Then the SEC removed that requirement. Then they re-instated it with a better system, which is where everybody gets that data now. It took about 15 years before everybody was on board with this.
Closi 5y ago
> First, get rid of software that holds your data hostage and cannot be controlled via APIs before you start thinking about “AI”. The paper is talking about using AI to improve screen-scraping performance for RPA frameworks, which is definitely a valid use case. As nice as it would be to always replace legacy systems with APIs, sometimes you have a job to do and need to get it done! If you are hired to build something and it needs to integrate with some windows application which can only be accessed via Citrix which you are not able to touch, then these tools come into their own (not as the preferred architectural choice, but as the only remaining practical option).

specialist 5y ago

Weird article. Apparently Robotic Process Automation is reducing repetitive tasks. 80+ years into the Information Age. And we're still confused. Automation is not digitization. Most everyone conflates the two. Automation is the removal of human judgement. This generally means simplification. All those biz pop terms like "business process reengineering". Digitization is using computers to do tasks previously performed by humans. IT (data processing) projects that set out to replace legacy systems, whether paper-based or prior software, generally fail. Because they do not first simplify the work being done. But rather attempt to fork lift current work onto a new media. In other words, digitization without prior automation. -- As for the selection of tools listed for Robotic Process Automation, they're fine mitigations. When one cannot or will not first simplify, the minions are reduced to relying on shims and screen scrapping. Ever more, I think most grand efforts like simplification, understanding, semantics, ontologies, and data interchange are quixotic. Just log everything and let future minions ferret out whatever interesting bits they might need. In other words, enable future software systems archaeologists and forensics teams to better mine the data, and don't try to code for the ages.

tuatoru 5y ago

In my Systems Analysis course back in the 1980s, at one point the instructor said something along the lines of "we could just automate the existing processes by taking the existing documents, making digital copies of them, and writing code to analyze them. But no-one would do that, because it's stupid." Here we are.

tejisant01 5y ago

Just one update: Win automation no longer exists. Microsoft transforms it to Power Automate Desktop. Fairly the same thing with some improvements, but not with the flexible that cames around with uipath.