  Owing to the increasing frequency and destruction of natural and manmade
disasters to modern highly-populated societies, emergency management, which
provides solutions to prevent or address disasters, have drawn considerable
research over the last few decades and become a multidisciplinary area. Because
of its open and inclusive nature, new technologies always tend to influence,
change or even revolutionise this research area. Hence, it is imperative to
consolidate the state-of-the-art studies and knowledge to meet the research
needs and identify the future research directions. The paper presents a
comprehensive and systemic review of the existing research in the field of
emergency management from both the system design aspect and algorithm
engineering aspect. We begin with the history and evolution of the emergency
management research. Then the two main research topics of this area, "emergency
navigation" and "emergency search and rescue planning", are introduced and
discussed. Finally, we suggest the emerging challenges and opportunities from
system optimisation, evacuee behaviour modelling and optimisation, computing
patterns, data analysis, energy and cyber security aspects.
