# Bot-Based Emergency Software Applications for Natural Disaster Situations
## 5 Related Work
However, none of these applications require processing a large amount of user requests as fast as possible without saturating the available resources. As we explained before, bots are typically used to collect data from different users. In the context of crisis and disaster management, the authors in [13] present a framework for a disaster-related information retrieval system and immediate notifications to support the execution of mine safety procedures. The system utilizes instant messaging (IM) applications as the user interface to look up information and send messages to announce the occurrence of disaster events. Following the same idea of using bots to collect data, the authors in [49] present their experience of applying a bot-based system for the government of Taiwan for disaster response operations. In particular, they describe a framework for implementing a bot as the data management system. The bot is designed to answer questions containing keywords from a given list. If the user forgets the keywords, the application will not allow them to advance or give correct information. The paper evaluates the usability of the application by checking if people were able to finish the tasks. Bots can be also used to provide information after a natural disaster strikes. This is the case of the work presented in [50], which allows sharing videos with subtitles and sign language for deaf people to help them during the evacuations. The authors report a usability satisfaction level of 95% in deaf people and 60% in hearing people. In addition, the authors in [51] present a bot using Telegram to provide emergency information to foreign people in Japan. It includes evacuation information and real-time disaster information, and the real-time disaster information is based on the user's current location. People can also share disaster-related pictures via the proposed application. People can share images of the disaster; however, it does not take into account, for example, whether the photos are real or if they are analyzed by experts. In Table 4, we compare the main features presented by Ayni, Rimay, Jayma, and other bot-based applications designed for crisis situations such as natural disasters. The table summarizes which applications support fault tolerance (Fault Tol. ), scalability (Scal. ), if the authors present a performance evaluation taking into account bottlenecks, critical tasks, and hardware resources (Perf.) and a usability evaluation (Usab.) of applications. The column Validation shows (A) if the experiments were performed on a real system, (B) with simulations and/or (D) with synthetic data. (C) indicates whether the application was validated by experts. In the column named Type, we use the number (1) for previous work presenting a guideline, (2) for applications or simulators that have been implemented, and (3) for previous work presenting a model or proposal not actually implemented. Finally, the column Deployment indicates if the applications can be executed sequentially, in parallel, and/or distributed or if it is not specified. Notice that most of the previous works describe the application proposed, but they do not present experiments to evaluate their features. Moreover, previous works are typically focused on specific natural disasters and are not re-used later. In this paper, we evaluate the performance achieved by Ayni, Rimay, and Jayma, which also support fault tolerance,scalability, and can be executed in parallel and distributed data centers due to being built using common practice for distributed software architecture design. In particular, we use Dockers and Kubernetes technologies. Additionally, we execute the experiments on real systems, and we validate the tasks executed by each application based on expert consensus. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work studies the behavior and performance achieved by applications designed for natural disasters situations running on commodity hardware usually available from public organizations such as universities.