There is a feature in Appian which could be called as "Automatic membership rule" - Officially called as Membership Rules - allows us to add users by rule based criteria, and could be mapped based on profile columns. Users added to group by this method would have the Member type column as Rule, which otherwise would be displayed as direct/indirect.

Only the first condition for a particular field will be considered when the rule is evaluated. For example, if you have the following two conditions in a rule, username contains "a" and username contains "b", only usernames with an "a" (but not those with a "b") will be added to the group. Use a custom field from user profile to support more complex membership rule logic.