Abstract: Robot process automation(RPA) is a business process automation technology based on software robot and artificial intelligence.It can replace or assist human beings to complete repetitive work in computers and other equipments.When applying RPA software to automate the browser page elements,how to quickly locate and search the target DOM elements on the premise of ensuring accuracy is the key technical difficulty to complete a complete automation process.The existing location methods,such as XPath and Css-Selector,will have problems such as slow location speed or inaccurate path location in the face of web pages with complex structure.In order to solve the above problems,a fast DOM object search and location algorithm for RPA system is proposed:the optimal XPATH path algorithm,which analyzes the attributes of elements and generates the optimal path to uniquely locate elements during automatic operation.Experimental results show that the time required to locate elements using the optimal path is only 23.14% of that using the complete XPATH path.It has the advantages of reducing the difficulty of path generation and improving the element positioning speed,and improves the automation efficiency.

Key words: Robot process automation, DOM element search, DOM element positioning, Automation, Web page structure