topic RE: Communication between Bot's in Product Forum

Communication between Bot's

GAVIN.RUDLING — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 08:03:00 GMT

Good day Team, Trust you had a wonderful festive season so far.

I had a single Bot / VM on the BPC platform that manages about 18 processes of which some of them are dependent on each other. I have now been provided with a second Bot/VM, to share the load and am trying to create a sort of management process to control the scheduling under certain conditions and statuses.

Both bots are looking at the same Queue, but I am not sure how to synchronize the communications between the Bots, to determine what the status might be of a dependent process, like completed, deferred or busy etc.

Any ideas / Solution on how to make this happen? Unfortunately, we do not have access to BP Supervisor.

Kind Regards

Gavin

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Gavin Rudling
Digital Consultant & Developer
Cog3nt
Africa/Johannesburg
0813906789
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RE: Communication between Bot's

Michael_S — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 14:25:00 GMT

@GAVIN.RUDLING - I'm just bumping your thread as I think it's a really good question that could benefit from community ideas. I'm also summoning some of our resident community experts to see if they have inspiration for you:

📞 @Nilesh Jadhav, @Neeraj Kumar, @Harish Mogulluri, @Denis__Dennehy, @Tejaskumar_Darji, @shreya.khot, @Michael ONeil

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💙 Michael
(I'm part of the SS&C Blue Prism Community Team)
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RE: Communication between Bot's

GAVIN.RUDLING — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 14:46:00 GMT

Hi Michael, much appreciated.

Looking forward to seeing some of the suggestions that might be available.

Kind regards

Gavin

RE: Communication between Bot's

shreya.khot — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 06:54:00 GMT

Hi Gary,

Going through the scenario, I see that you want a confirmation if Process-1 has run or not before you trigger Process-2 which is dependent on first. This can be controlled by either creating a new process which calls these process step-by-step if everything is supposed to run on single bot or if you want to run the processes on multiple bots then you can use an excel or notepad which helps you to communicate the completion time of the processes.

Process-1 generates one file which Process-2 will initially look for & then only it will start launching applications to continue the next steps.

Let me know your thoughts on this.

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Shreya Satish Udagave
Technical Architect | Associate Consultant
Northern Trust Operating Services, Pune
Email- shreya14khot@gmail.com
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RE: Communication between Bot's

GAVIN.RUDLING — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 08:37:00 GMT

Hi Shreya, Thank you very much for responding.

I have done something similar, if I understand you correctly.

For explanation purposes I have the following:

On the BPC platform, I have 2 Bots

Bots: Prod1 & Prod4

Processes: Process 1 & Process 2 of which Process 2 is dependent on Process 1

Schedule Process, which runs on each Bot.

Queue: Queue_X

In my case, the Schedule Process is running on both Bots, Prod1 & Prod4 every 5 minutes, populating Queue_X, based on conditions and criteria kept in a collection in the schedule Process.

With my scenario, I require the schedulers to communicate with each other, just in case the Prod1 scheduler defers a process or throws an exception Prod 4 will know about this. I tried to use an Excel document on a shared drive to which both schedulers could write to, which is then used to update my collection. This scenario is my problem, and I was looking for an alternative. This is in testing and in the client's world I will not have access to a shared folder. I think Ideally, I would like to have 1 scheduler controlling 2 bots and not 2 instances of the same scheduler running, but I am not sure if it is possible.

When running with 1 Bot, there doesn't seem to be a issue, but with 2 I seem to miss some information somewhere. I think it's timing while extracting updates from the Excel to the collection. I am still not sure.

Kind regards

Gavin

RE: Communication between Bot's

AndrewPascal — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 14:59:00 GMT

Hi Gavin,

Could you use a Blue Prism queue - either the actual work queue "Queue_X", or a separate "management" queue - to communicate between the two robots? If the messages are brief, you could put them in tags or status. If you need more extensive messages, you could store them in the item data. I'm not sure exactly what messaging you need, but it's just a thought.

Kind regards,

Andrew Pascal

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Andrew Pascal
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RE: Communication between Bot's

NileshJadhavBP — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 19:37:00 GMT

Hi Gavin,

Please check my attached solution, it might help you to achieve your goal however I am unclear about for below points.

· You have not mentioned about your process work and requirements clearly.

· You are calling process one by one, why do you need to know whether other bot has an error or not, it can be handled in the process only.

· Schedulers are just to trigger the process.

· Can you please add more clarity to help you in a better way.

Solution from my side.

· I have created 3 different processes as per my understanding, as per your requirements.

Do let me know if you need more information.

Thanks

Nilesh

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Nilesh Jadhav
Project Leader(RPA).
ADP
India
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RE: Communication between Bot's

zdenek.kabatek — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 09:03:00 GMT

Hello, Gavin,

if you want to keep your excel approach you need to implement locking of the activity when writing to excel so that both bots won't write at the same time in the excel which would fail anyway. There is an option to get a Lock and in your processes to check whether the excel is locked or not and based on that you can either wait (in case it is locked) for certain time interval until is unlocked and then the second bot can write to the excel, of course, it needs to be locked again by second bot.

I am not sure if it is clear from what I described but check the documentation with the word Lock or Locking and you will find more details.

Regards

Zdenek

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Zdeněk Kabátek
Head of Professional Services
NEOOPS
http://www.neoops.com/
Europe/Prague
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RE: Communication between Bot's

Denis__Dennehy — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 09:32:00 GMT

There are a number of different solutions for this - you can maybe search other threads about having a parent process or getting best utilisation out of your robots.
There are also a few assets on the BP Digital Exchange related to this including this one created by BP themselves which has a good doc: Blue Prism Digital Exchange

The key concept is that the robots do not make the decision themselves by looking at what the other robot is doing, in the same way human workers in a back office admin centre are managed based upon workloads and SLAs rather than figuring out what to do amongst themselves. How robots are informed of what they should be working can be logic stored in a Parent Process the robots run (although Parent Processes can get unwieldy when you have many robots and many processes), or a Parent queue logic which is then checked between cases in some way, or something more complex depending on the complexity of your RPA estate.

There are also tools out there that can help with this, although they can be expensive, such as RPA Supervisor (now known as C TWO), also the Blue Prism product team has been working on a more advanced Schedular/Control room functionality that should do most of this type of logic - although it is a long time coming, they announced Active Queues was coming with version 5 back in 2015 or 2016 and then only ever delivered a small part of it, leaving out the smart/useful stuff (I suspect they will actually get to fix this with a great browser based control room schedular soon).

RE: Communication between Bot's

michaeloneil — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 15:10:00 GMT

Hi Gavin

A simple solution which worked for me with a similar scenario was to create a 'tracker' work queue item. 2 Processes used the same queue but process 2 would only be triggered if the queue contained a work item that was only completed if process 1 had been run that day and fully completed. Process 2 would run and an initial check of the queue for the tracker item from process 1 and if that work item was showing as pending or exception then process 2 would do nothing until the next scheduled run where it would check again.

Hopefully im understanding your scenario correctly.

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Michael ONeil
Technical Lead developer
NTTData
Europe/London
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RE: Communication between Bot's

GAVIN.RUDLING — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 06:07:00 GMT

Hi Andrew, much appreciated.

Quite possible, I have been thinking of this over the festive break. I just got to figure out the how (design), with what I currently have.

I do think it is possible, just need time to think on a few ideas.

At the moment I'm leaning towards possibly a 2-queue scenario, one being the scheduled tasks to run the processes and the other to manage the conditions.

Kind regards

Gavin

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Gavin Rudling
Digital Consultant & Developer
Cog3nt
Africa/Johannesburg
0813906789
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RE: Communication between Bot's

GAVIN.RUDLING — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 06:16:00 GMT

Hi Zdenek

Thanks for the idea, I will look into this as well.

To be honest I was not aware that you could lock something like an excel document. I thought the document would be automatically locked when opened, then I check to see if the document is read only.

I am not sure if I understand fully yet. Is there a specific VBO on which I can do the locking? The only one I am aware of is the in the Work Queue VBO. Is that the same one?

Kind regards

Gavin

RE: Communication between Bot's

GAVIN.RUDLING — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 06:37:00 GMT

Hi Denis,

I agree with your key concept. The production bots should just respond to the item that is in the queue regardless of which bot picks up the task and this logic should not be in any of the Clients (sub) processes.

I have a management process that contains the supposed logic for that.

This is the first of this type of project that I am getting involved with, so I am still investigating the how too.

To make it more difficult, we don't have a development platform where we can test and analyse, and processes can be requested to be added at almost any time., so for me there is a bit of a challenge.

We seem to be finding the need to do this more often, but at this point each opportunity and / or client seems to have their unique requirements and infrastructures. (On-Prem and Cloud).

Thanks again for your valued comments and suggestions, much appreciated.

Kind regards

Gavin

RE: Communication between Bot's

GAVIN.RUDLING — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 07:12:00 GMT

Hi Nilesh

Sorry I am not strong with putting thoughts into words and thank you for all the effort you have provided to explain a possible solution.

I will go through your suggestions and certainly will use some of the ideas.

I have the 2 bots that are running with approximately 18 processes across 3 different Business units for a Parent company which spans over 3 different countries in Southern Africa.

Some of these processes can run at any time and some are dependent on certain conditions which could be based on results of other process.

We used to run with just one (1) bot, so everything was just in sequence, but now there are too many processes to run in a single day, so we have acquired another bot to handle the workload, so some processes are running in parallel.

I have now created a work queue with a list of all the processes which need to run for the day.

I just need to work out some logic to load the work queue with the process that needs to run next if all the conditions have been met.

Example of conditions: A dependent process has been delayed or deferred to a later time, or maybe even failed for some reason.

Process (A) might have been run by Bot (1) and Process (B) might be picked up by Bot (2)

So basically, I am looking for the best way to design the schedule managing process.

Thank you once again.

Kind regards

Gavin

RE: Communication between Bot's

GAVIN.RUDLING — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 07:27:00 GMT

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your response, much appreciated.

I am busy working on a design very similar to how you have explained it below.

I just have to cater for about 18+ processes and a number of various conditions.

I may be over complicating the scheduler process, by trying to make the scalability as simple as possible, as I got a good idea what is going to happen in the future with additional processes been added, etc.

Kind regards

Gavin

Re: Communication between Bot's

shreya.khot — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 06:05:14 GMT

Hi Gavin,

I was going through the content on Digital Exchange & came across one of the packages which reminded me of this discussion...

Utility Program for Work Queue Item Mover XBP - 1.0.0

check if this object helps you with any of the features- https://digitalexchange.blueprism.com/dx/entry/3439/solution/work-queue-item-mover

Thanks