Process-driven Development and Analysis of Multi-Robot Systems

Robots capable of cooperating to accomplish a common mission, i.e., multi- robot systems, are emerging to perform complex tasks in different applica- tion domains, by supporting or automatizing human tasks. The behavioral workflow of these systems, referred to as mission, can be seen as a sequence of tasks enabling both robots’ actions and inter-robot interactions. Hence, considering robots’ behavior at a high level allows for conceptualizing their missions as process models. In the context of process models, Business Pro- cess Management (BPM) is the reference discipline that enables their usage to describe the overall workflow of a system, including its design, enactment, monitoring, analysis, and refinement. Using process models in the robotics domain can leverage the techniques belonging to the BPM discipline. Specifically, two primary approaches can be employed. A top-down approach involves designing processes to model the robotic mission, facilitating its execution according to the planned se- quence. This concept belongs to model-driven approaches, utilizing high-level modeling languages to facilitate both the modeling and enactment phases. Differently, a bottom-up approach leverages data generated during robot op- erations to discover and analyze mission executions. This approach exploits process mining techniques to automatically extract insights related to the multi-robot execution. Although BPM is a well-established discipline, its integration with the robotics domain has not been sufficiently investigated. Nevertheless, com- bining process models with robotic systems holds significant potential, light- ening the effort to program the behavior of robots and their interactions, and enabling the analysis of different aspects impacting multi-robot executions. Indeed, process models can provide a robust solution for modeling and enacting the system. Whereas, data captured by these systems can enhance process models with insights from the physical world. This thesis focuses on investigating the application of BPM techniques in the robotics domain, aiming to outline the advantages and challenges of this integration. The thesis proposes a top-down and a bottom-up approach to leverage process models for multi-robot systems development and anal- ysis. The top-down approach consists of a process-driven development of multi-robot systems by employing business processes to design the system’s behavior and integrating direct process enactment into the robotic architec- ture. In the opposite direction, the bottom-up approach offers a methodology to facilitate the extraction of event logs, which represent robotic activities, during the execution of robotic systems. These event logs enable the mining of the process model depicting the system workflow and system analysis from various perspectives.