# Bot-Based Emergency Software Applications for Natural Disaster Situations
## 5 Related Work  
In this section, we first present some discussion about software applications used to help, assist affected people, and manage resources after a natural disaster occurs. Then, we discuss previous work using bot systems aimed to inform and to aid people. The evaluation and prediction of the outcome of natural disasters have been extensively studied in the technical literature. The studies presented in [22; 23; 24; 25] use agent-based simulation tools for population modeling, infrastructure development planning, country reconstruction humanitarian support operations, and simulation of rivers and overflows, among others. These studies can be used by people involved in planning rescue activities. A study performed after the tsunami in Tailandia 2004 [26] presents the problems detected in the public management of natural disasters such as logistic problems for distributing goods for emergency relief; lack of effective collaboration among institutions in different levels; lack of encouragement for participation of local and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs); lack of education and knowledge for tsunami in potential disaster-affected communities and lack of information management or database system. The authors present the use cases of an application to solve logistic problems for distributing goods for emergency relief and to coordinate help between different institutions and NGOs. They conclude that NGOs must coordinate the tasks during a disaster in addition to sharing vital information with each other during effective communication channels. As communication networks are a critical resource during a natural disaster, the work in [27] provides guidelines to support fault tolerance with different communication networks such as wifi, SDR, Satellite Telephony, etc., using information obtained during Hurricane Katrina. The authors propose using a relational database and a front-end deployed on a grid computing to support a high load of requests in a short time. The  
Figure 17: Distributed deployment: Resource utilization reported by (a) MongoDB and (b) the workers for the task “Send alert”. Figure 18: Communication cost in bytes reported by the Jayma application. author shows that the fastest recovering network is in data networks. This supports our proposal of using bot-based applications. Different software applications--without bots running on social platforms such as Messenger of Facebook or Telegram--have been presented in the technical literature [28; 29; 30; 31; 32; 33]. The system presented in [28] was initially developed in 2-3 weeks in response to the tsunami in Sri Lanka (2004) by volunteer developers. Today, it has a series of libraries and APIs: Location API, GIS API, generic Reporting API, DataBase, and Synchronization API, among others. It supports different operations such as the registration of organizations, the request management system, and the register of persons. However, the system is deployed on a single processor, and the authors do not present a performance evaluation. Therefore, its proper deployment during a natural disaster requires engineers who are experts in fault tolerance, saturated systems, and managing peaks of requests. A mobile application presented in [29] takes advantage of probabilistic geosocial information collected before the event to guide an earthquake victim and rescuers during and after the earthquake. It has four operation modes. The standby mode is used to collect data about users, their regularly visited locations, and their social relationships. Another mode, alert mode, warns of an imminent earthquake based on data collected from a variety of sensors and government alert systems. In disaster mode, it helps users cope with their tasks, such as the evacuation and rescue of victims buried under the rubble of collapsed buildings. In recovery mode, it facilitates family reunification, provides information on help centers, and sends warnings about the spread of disease. The authors present the use cases for the application without validation.