Objectives  Major disasters and accidents happened from time to time, posing serious threats to the people's lives, property, and sustainable developments of human social economy. As an important part of post?disaster emergency response, emergency evacuation makes great contributions to reducing casualties.With massive efforts of researchers from various domains for decades, many valuable patterns of evacuation were observed and excellent models have been proposed to develop the emergency evacuation theory and methodology. However, the disaster and accident types, affected people, and emergency scenarios embedded into emergency evacuations for major disasters and accidents are very complicated and diverse. As a result, the focuses and methodologies of emergency evacuation models are widely different, greatly increa?sing the difficulty of understanding its research status from a global perspective.

  Methods  In order to solve this issue, we review and briefly criticize the literatures of emergency evacuation models from multiple perspectives, including emergency evacuation behavioral modeling, evacuation simulation, evacuation strategy optimization, implementation of emergency preparedness plans, and so on. By collecting, classifying, and summarizing current research status, a clear clue of emergency evacuation researches is presented.

  Results  Within this classification system, the evacuation requirements of major disasters and accidents, evacuation behavioral characteristics, functions and application scenarios of evacuation models, advantages and disadvantages of evacuation models would be easily captured. Furthermore, the bottlenecks of current unsettled challenges, burgeoning high technology, and future directions are presented from the author's opinion for the next developments of emergency evacuation researches.

  Conclusions  With these systematic and methodical introductions, readers can easily understand the evacuation models and their applicable scenarios from both global and local perspectives.