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.

Digitization relies on emerging technologies driven by Internet of Things. This not only affects businesses, but also the entire society: smart homes, smart agriculture, and intelligent transportation. The connection of “things” under the same umbrella applies also in education through massive open online courses (MOOCs). Each industry should adapt to the changes brought by Digital Era. This paper makes an introduction to the challenges that come together with Industry 4.0 and proposes Process Mining techniques as a new approach for business process analysis in order to support companies to rapidly adapt to market changes by offering customized solutions for customers. The study provides a brief overview of Industry 4.0 and gradually introduces Process Mining as a purview of Industry 4.0. A case study approach is used to confirm the advantages brought by Process Mining. Different types of graphical visualization describing both control-flow and resource perspectives are also presented.