Experimental Framework to Simulate Rescue Operations after a Natural Disaster

Abstract

Computational simulation is a powerful tool for performance evaluation of computational systems. It is useful to make capacity planning of data center clusters, to obtain profiling reports of software applications and to detect bottlenecks. It has been used in different research areas like large scale Web search engines, natural disaster evacuations, computational biology, human behavior and tendency, among many others. However, properly tuning the parameters of the simulators, defining the scenarios to be simulated and collecting the data traces is not an easy task. It is an incremental process which requires constantly comparing the estimated metrics and the flow of simulated actions against real data. In this work, we present an experimental framework designed for the development of large scale simulations of two applications used upon the occurrence of a natural disaster strikes. The first one is a social application aimed to register volunteers and manage emergency campaigns and tasks. The second one is a benchmark application a data repository named MongoDB. The applications are deployed in a distributed platform which combines different technologies like a Proxy, a Containers Orchestrator, Containers and a NoSQL Database. We simulate both applications and the architecture platform. We validate our simulators using real traces collected during simulacrums of emergency situations.