# Bot-Based Emergency Software Applications for Natural Disaster Situations
## 7 Conclusions and Future Work  
In this work, we evaluate the feasibility of using bots in three applications to collect the information of affected people and also to register spontaneous volunteers and to coordinate the tasks executed in different missions. In particular, we present a performance evaluation to detect the critical tasks and saturation points of the bot-based software applications. The first application called Jayma is designed to send a message to the contacts of the affected people with information about their status and location. The second application is designed to manage a set of events and tasks created by administrators and to coordinate volunteers who want to help. The third application, Ayni, is aimed at registering volunteers and managing emergency campaigns and tasks. The bots of these applications run on third-party platforms such as Messenger of Facebook and Telegram. This limits the number of messages we can send per second to the users. In addition, if these platforms fail, our applications will not be available. However, these are well-known platforms, and a person who can potentially participate as a spontaneous volunteer will be familiar with them and will not need to install any additional software. We implement the applications as stateless and deploy them on a microservices-based platform with Kubernetes and Docker technologies. Therefore, the applications can be deployed and executed in parallel due to its replication capabilities and also on distributed environments. The platform architecture contains a front-end, a back-end, a bot-back-end, and a repository (database). We instrument the codes to obtain benchmarks of the tasks executed in each application that run on different resources. We show that the applications are able to cope with critical mission requirements. This fact is shown throughout a comprehensive performance evaluation study on actual commodity hardware. To this end, we conduct experiments to analyze and evaluate potential bottlenecks and determine capacity in terms of the number of requests served per second in each of the applications. The validation of the tasks executed by the applications was based on expert consensus. The experiments on a single processor showed that the Ayni application supports less than 60 requests per second without crashing. With a higher number of requests per second, some tasks became unstable, and some requests did not complete. In this application, the CPU tends to saturate faster than other resources. In the Rimay application, the CPU is also a critical resource showing utilization levels close to 70%. Meanwhile, in the Jayma application, the RAM memory is the most critical resource, showing utilization levels close to 100%. The results show that it is possible to build a software stack designed to support the execution of software applications that have properties for emergencies such as high availability, elasticity, fault tolerance, scalability, mobility (change data center dynamically), and multi-environment. All these features have not been included and evaluated in previous bot-based software applications. The multi-environment is satisfied by using bots of social media applications commonly used by people plus the use of Dockers that allow deployment on different operating systems and facilitate deployment in the cloud. Mobility is achieved by using Dockers and Kubernetes for application management and monitoring. Fault tolerance is achieved by using Kubernetes and Docker registry (Container Database), data replication, and volatile applications where data do not need to be recovered after a failure. Scalability is achieved by using Kubernetes. A configuration file allows generating replicas of the application and also stateless applications design. As future work, we plan to include new communication channels between the users and other agents rather than friends or family to prevent disaster events that can propagate to other cities or communities such as blackouts or floods.