Distribute work among a pool of unattended robots, that is, robots that work independently of human attention. These robots can handle simple, tedious tasks that are prone to automation. By automating tasks in your application, you can reduce errors and release your staff to focus on more valuable tasks.

You assign work to a robot through Case Management. Unattended robots can also monitor outlook folders, network directories, or external queues for work.

This article covers the following topics:

• Automation development
• RPA deployment model
• Methods for integrating unattended robots with your application
  • Robotic assignment
  • Data page integration

Automation development

Use Pega Robot Studio to create automations that are integrated with your Pega application. The automation developer must configure the Robotic Activity with the following information:

• Case type class
• Robotic activity name
• All fields required to get or set data as part of the automation.
  All names must match those from the Flow action or Data Page.

For example, your Pega application might contain fields that users can edit and whose values you want to send to the automation to fill other fields. The automation receives the required values (for example, First name, Last name, and Email address), and then feeds the information to all the required applications that are running on the desktop, performs the required steps and gets the required fields from these applications (for example, Credit Score and National Insurance Number). These fields must be marked as relevant records.

Fields that you add in Case Designer or Data Designer are automatically marked as relevant records. You can also add other fields (properties) that were created in Designer Studio on the Relevant Records landing page.

For more information, see Marking records as relevant records.

After the Pega Robot Studio developer specifies a class name, the automation retrieves the fields that are marked as relevant records, and the developer can select which of those fields are to share. You can share scalar data only between your application and automation.

For more information, see Configuration of robotic automation for Pega Platform applications.

RPA deployment models

In Robot Manager, you can configure your robots to subscribe to work groups which are associated with work queues. A robot subscribes to one or multiple work groups (through the candidate work group list) and this way accesses work queues that contain automation tasks to complete.

One of the common use cases involves a robot that subscribes to a single work group and performs robotic assignments within a single work queue. Such configuration is typical to single-purpose robots.

To address senarios that require versatile robots that can perform various types of tasks, you can assign a single robot to a work group in which it can perform assignments from multiple work queues.

Finally, you can assign a robot to multiple work groups in which that robot can perform tasks as part of a single or multiple work queues. Use this model for advanced, multi-purpose, multi-task robots.

An example of unattended automation might involve processing one or more stages of an automobile insurance claim. After a client submits a claim, that claim can immediately be routed to a robot, which runs an automation that analyzes the information submitted with the claim, looks up and verifies policyholder information, and updates web and desktop applications with case information.

Methods for integrating unattended robots with your application

You can source automations in your application through the Assign to robot queue smart shape or by means of data pages.

Robotic assignment integration

Integration of unattended robots with Pega Case Management takes effect through the Assign to robot queue smart shape, as shown in the following example:

For more information, see Assigning a task to a robotic work queue.

Data page integration 

You can also configure your automations to source data pages in your application. Data pages provide automatic access to data by populating page and page list properties with relevant data, depending on the circumstances and your business use case.

For example, see the following figure:

For more information, see Creating a data page.