A Study Toward Combined Approaches Using AI-Based RPA and SOA-Based BPM: A Future Perspective

Business Process Management (BPM) automates the business processes, improves the overall performance of automation by optimizing the business processes, and further aligns them with the business goals. Recently, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which is based on software bots has gained huge popularity for business process automation due to its fast processing speed, low development cost, and less implementation knowledge required. Nowadays, researchers are focusing on combining BPM and RPA to gain the potential of both approaches. Initially, the present paper introduces the concepts of BPM and RPA and discusses the synergy between BPM and RPA. Then it provides an extensive review study of existing approaches, which are based on the integration of RPA-BPM. Further, it identifies the major research challenges associated with the existing approaches and defines a roadmap for future research directions in the said areas based on the identified issues. Furthermore, it redesigns the business process automation lifecycle while considering future perspectives.