RPA Architecture: Architecture Components, Tools, Examples [Detailed Guide]

Do you wonder how automation takes place? And who is responsible for it? 

The solution to automation problems is RPA, and in this article, you’ll find out what RPA is and how it operates. You’ll also find out what is RPA architecture so that you can understand its operation better. 

Let’s get started. 

What is RPA?

When a software program emulates human actions on digital systems to perform business operations, we call it a Robot Process Automation (also known as Robot Process Management). Its abbreviation is RPA. RPA helps organizations in automating repetitive processes, which saves their time and resources. 

The name of RPA is self-explanatory as a robot is something that imitates human actions. A process is a sequence of steps that cause meaningful activity, and automation is when a program performs a task without human supervision or intervention. 

Enrol for the Machine Learning Course from the World’s top Universities. Earn Masters, Executive PGP, or Advanced Certificate Programs to fast-track your career.

They are better than humans in performing their duties because:

• They don’t get tired
• They don’t take breaks
• They are less expensive

They are less prone to errors than humans, which makes them a perfect tool for any organization. There are multiple RPA tools available in the market, including UiPath and Blue Prism.

Now that we’ve revised what RPA is, we can start discussing RPA architecture. 

RPA Architecture Components

The architecture of any RPA tool is very complex and has multiple components. Each of these components has a set of duties to perform. Here is a small list of all elements of an RPA architecture:

• RPA tools
• Platform
• Execution Infrastructure
• Configuration Management

Let’s discuss each one of those in detail to understand it better. 

Also Read: Machine Learning Engineer Salary in India

Tools of RPA

No matter what RPA software you use, its tools should have several capabilities. They should be able to automate multiple kinds of application environments, including Citrix, desktop, and web environments. 

They should be able to develop digital robots and them through programming logic. These robots should understand through configuring and recordings. They should build components you can reuse later and apply them to other robots. This way, you’d have fast deployment speed and modularity. Having such elements also makes the maintenance of them more manageable.

The tools of your RPA software should have the ability to read and write from multiple data sources. They’d have to build shared application object stores and repositories for keeping locators so they should be capable of that as well. 

Platform

All of your RPA bots and tools remain stored in the cloud, which we call the RPA platform. This platform allows the storage of all your RPA based resources and software robots. You can divide these assets further across the software robots library. The RPA platform can schedule, monitor, and distribute the software robots of your system. 

It can give you helpful and valuable analytics about the RPA bots and their statistics for better insight. 

Execution Infrastructure

The execution infrastructure of RPA stores the virtual or physical lab machines that you can control through usage patterns. You can also scale up (or scale down) the number of machines in the system parallelly to automate the task through the execution infrastructure. This process is completely automated, and it rarely requires any human supervision or intervention. So, you can let it work on its own. 

Also Read: Machine Learning Project Ideas

Configuration Management

RPA’s configuration management looks after the versioning of the assets. It ensures that your software robots and assets get regular updates, and if needed, it introduces newer versions as well. When you scale up, the different members of your team develop new RPA assets. Because some assets are reusable and shareable across multiple software robots, it’s vital to have source code management solutions for merging and branching of those assets. 

RPA has multiple layers, as you can see in this guide. So, you can’t assume that RPA is a single tool. It’s a collection of numerous devices and assets that work together to create a fully functioning architecture. 

At the start of every process, the system first educates the software bots, and then you have to consider the kind of modifications you require for the procedure. After that, you perform the automation and keep it in check to make sure it runs continuously without any hindrances. The configuration management looks after the automation. After a particular iteration of automation, you’d examine the process, software bots, and assets to see if there’s any room for improvement. With these repeated processes, your system gets better regularly, and you get the optimal Robot Process Automation for your enterprise. 

An Example of RPA Architecture: UiPath

UiPath is a leading RPA tool provider in the market. Its solution helps organizations in automating workflows and enhance their efficiency substantially. UiPath has a drag and drop interface, which smoothens the learning curve. UiPath’s architecture has three layers, as well. They are:

• Client
• Server
• Persistency

The client layer has UiPath Studio and UiPath Robot, whereas the server has UiPath Orchestrator. The Persistency layer of UiPath contains the Database. All of these components have specific roles. This was just an example, many other RPA solutions have such layers and components, and they function similarly to the manner we’ve discussed previously.

What to look for while selecting RPA software?

As you must’ve noticed, an RPA architecture has multiple components. To build an optimal RPA system for your operation, you should get your RPA components from a single vendor. That’s because they’d integrate more effectively, and you wouldn’t face any compatibility issues. 

Some vendors only offer a particular component of RPA, such as the configuration management or the platform. On the other hand, you can also find vendors who provide all the parts separately. The most crucial aspect to look at while selecting any RPA solution is to check the configuration management. It’s responsible for keeping your resources up to date while scaling up. And you wouldn’t want to face those issues later on. 

Conclusion

So, in the end, you found out what RPA is and how it functions. We also discussed how you could find a suitable RPA solution according to your needs. Robotic automation is an exciting topic, and many organizations are continually working on its development.

If you’re interested to learn more about machine learning, check out IIIT-B & upGrad’s PG Diploma in Machine Learning & AI which is designed for working professionals and offers 450+ hours of rigorous training, 30+ case studies & assignments, IIIT-B Alumni status, 5+ practical hands-on capstone projects & job assistance with top firms.