8 Towards end-to-end business process automation

In recent years, robotic process automation (RPA) emerged as a vehicle to digital transformation in enterprises. However, RPA still possesses many shortcomings that have prevented it from generalizing well to new domains while minimizing coding overhead and approaching end-to-end business process automation. Recent work has looked to utilize artificial intelligence technology to address RPA’s limitations. In this work, we discuss the different approaches to RPA collaboration which is essential to achieving end-to-end automation. From rule-based composition to offline composition using automated planning and online composition using multi-agent orchestration, we present existing approaches in the literature, analyze remaining challenges, and propose insights into future research directions.