UiPath Healing Agent

Automation is transforming industries, making workflows more efficient and reliable. However, maintaining stability amidst evolving user interfaces (UI) remains a significant challenge. Applications are constantly updated, layouts shift, and unexpected pop-ups disrupt processes. These issues can lead to broken automations, downtime, and increased maintenance costs.

UiPath’s Healing Agent, part of its Modern UI Automation suite, is a breakthrough solution designed to ensure automation resilience. By leveraging Just-In-Time (JIT) analysis and advanced recovery strategies, it dynamically adapts to UI changes, providing a self-healing experience. In this blog, we will explore all about healing agents and how enterprises can integrate them into their existing workflows for faster and accurate outcomes.

What are Healing Agents?

User interface automation is inherently challenging due to frequent updates, changing frameworks, network dependencies, and variable application performance. These factors can lead to automation failures, frustrating users and increasing costs.

The Healing Agent provides a robust solution by identifying and addressing UI automation issues in real-time. Through advanced recovery strategies, including both heuristic logic and AI enhancements, it ensures uninterrupted automation.

Two Standout Benefits of the Healing Agent Are:

For example, if an overlay interferes with the automation, the Healing Agent will close it, adjust the selector, and apply dynamic wait times to keep the process on track.

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What are the Key Capabilities of Healing Agents?

The Healing Agent is a feature designed specifically for UiPath’s Modern UI Automation activities. It automatically adapts to dynamic UI environments by recognizing and resolving issues in real-time.

Key Capabilities:

Selector Adjustments: Updates selectors dynamically to match changing UI elements.

Pop-up Management: Detects and dismisses obstructions like overlays or pop-ups.

Error Recovery: Identifies and resolves runtime errors without requiring human intervention.

Whether used in attended or unattended automations, the Healing Agent brings efficiency, adaptability, and resilience to automation workflows.

Challenges Addressed by the Healing Agent

The Healing Agent is designed to address some of the most common and disruptive challenges faced in automation, ensuring smoother and more reliable workflows.

Here's how it tackles each issue:

Frequent UI Changes

Applications are constantly evolving. Buttons move, layouts are updated, and labels change to improve user experience. These seemingly minor updates can break automation processes because bots depend on specific configurations to identify and interact with elements. The Healing Agent steps in by automatically adapting to these changes, recalibrating itself in real-time to ensure that the automation continues without any manual intervention. This saves time, reduces disruptions, and keeps workflows running seamlessly.

Selector Instability

Selectors are like the roadmap for bots. They guide bots to interact with specific UI elements. However, when a UI is updated, selectors can become invalid, causing automation to fail. The Healing Agent proactively detects when selectors are no longer valid and recalibrates them dynamically. By analyzing changes in UI attributes such as IDs, tags, or positions, it ensures workflows remain functional.

Unexpected Pop-ups

Pop-ups and overlays are some of the most common and frustrating challenges in automation. Whether it’s a system notification or a confirmation dialog, these pop-ups often obstruct the bot from completing its task. The Healing Agent detects these interruptions, identifies their close or dismiss buttons, and removes them intelligently. This allows the bot to focus on its original task without missing a beat or requiring manual intervention.

Dynamic Loading Times

Every application responds differently depending on factors like network speed, system load, or user activity. Bots that operate on fixed timeouts often run into issues when elements take longer to load than expected. The Healing Agent solves this problem by dynamically adjusting wait times based on real-time analysis of the UI state. It ensures the bot interacts with elements only when they are fully loaded and ready for action, preventing premature actions and workflow breakdowns.

Watch how the Healing Agent Works:

Auto Healing Dynamic Delay

How the Healing Agent Works?

The Healing Agent is designed to ensure that automation processes remain stable and uninterrupted, even when the UI changes dynamically or unexpected errors occur. It uses a combination of AI-based approaches and heuristic (rule-based) logic to identify and address issues during runtime.

Here's a deeper explanation of how it operates:

Dynamic Selector Adjustment

Selectors are the backbone of UI automation, as they help bots identify and interact with UI elements. However, when an application undergoes updates, such as changes to button positions, labels, or attributes, selectors may break.

The Healing Agent uses AI to analyze the layout, attributes, and metadata of the UI in real-time. It compares the original selector configuration with the current state of the UI and automatically updates or adjusts the selector to match the new element attributes.

For example, if the tag or ID of a button changes, the Healing Agent recalibrates the selector dynamically to ensure the bot can still identify and interact with the button.

Watch How Auto Healing Agent Adapts to UI Changes:

Auto Healing Selector Change

Error Detection and Recovery

Automation processes can fail due to unexpected errors, such as missing elements, incorrect configurations, or changes in the application state. The Healing Agent acts as a proactive watchdog to address these issues.

When an error is detected, the Healing Agent investigates its root cause by analyzing the UI state and context. Based on this analysis, it applies recovery strategies, such as regenerating selectors, retrying the action, or waiting for a delayed element to load. This proactive recovery ensures that the bot doesn’t stop abruptly and can proceed with its tasks.

Pop-up and Delay Management

Pop-ups and delays are common hurdles in UI automation. Pop-ups might obstruct the target elements, while delays in loading elements can cause the bot to act prematurely. The Healing Agent intelligently manages these scenarios:

• Pop-up Handling: If a pop-up or overlay obstructs the target element, the Healing Agent identifies it, locates its “close” or “dismiss” button, and clears it before retrying the intended action.

Here’s How the Auto Healing Agent Addresses a Random Pop-up:

Auto Healing Random Popup

• Dynamic Delays: Instead of relying on predefined timeouts, the Healing Agent monitors the loading state of the target elements. It dynamically adjusts the waiting time based on the application’s performance, ensuring that the bot interacts with elements only after they are fully loaded.

In short, the Healing Agent is like a safety net for automations, ensuring that they adapt seamlessly to UI changes, recover from unexpected issues, and proceed without human intervention. This significantly enhances the reliability and resilience of automation processes.

Requirements for the Healing Agent

To use the Healing Agent, certain prerequisites must be met:

• UiPath Studio: Version 24.10 or higher.
• Modern UI Activities: Must be enabled and kept up to date.
• Orchestrator: A cloud-supported setup with necessary role permissions.
• Object Repository: Proper structuring ensures accurate selector management.

These requirements set the foundation for a seamless healing experience, making the Healing Agent an invaluable tool in automation workflows.

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Key Benefits of the Healing Agent

The Healing Agent brings several advantages:

• Increased Reliability: Bots remain operational even amidst UI changes.
• Reduced Maintenance: Automation becomes more self-sufficient, reducing manual interventions.
• Scalability: Managing large-scale automation becomes easier with fewer disruptions.
• Cost Efficiency: By minimizing downtime, businesses save both time and resources.

Potential Limitations of the Healing Agent

While the Healing Agent is a powerful tool in ensuring the resilience and efficiency of Intelligent UI Automation, it does have some limitations. Understanding these constraints helps set the right expectations and ensures the solution is used in the most effective way. Here’s a look at where the Healing Agent might not fully deliver, and how these limitations could impact your automation efforts.

Project Compatibility

The Healing Agent supports only Windows and Cross-platform projects. Legacy projects are not supported.

Pop-up Handling Dependency

The Healing Agent can only close intrusive pop-ups or dialogs if UI Automation activities are configured with the Verify Execution feature. Without this, the agent cannot determine if a pop-up window should be dismissed.

Computer Vision Limitations

Targets solely based on Computer Vision are not recoverable at this time.

Classic Activities

Classic UI Automation activities are not supported, as the Healing Agent works exclusively with Modern Activities.

Remote Environment Constraints

The Healing Agent cannot detect dialogs or interfering applications when automations are executed in remote environments like RDP, Citrix, or VMware.

Server-less Robot Limitations

For automations executed on server-less robots, the Healing Agent cannot detect, or handle alerts or prompts effectively.

Optimize Automation Reliability and Efficiency with UiPath Healing Agent

The Healing Agent is revolutionizing UI automation by providing a self-healing mechanism that reduces downtime, minimizes maintenance, and ensures scalability. By addressing dynamic UI challenges head-on, it empowers businesses to focus on growth rather than maintenance. While its scope is currently limited to UI-based automation, its robust capabilities make it an essential tool for modern automation workflows.

For organizations looking to enhance automation reliability and efficiency, the Healing Agent offers a powerful solution to navigate the complexities of dynamic UI environments. As a trusted platinum UiPath partner, Accelirate can ensure a seamless roadmap for self-healing bot deployment while leveraging its full capabilities. Contact us today!

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