The Emerging Area Of Emergency Management And Engineering

Successful emergency management requires a better understanding of events with potentially disastrous consequences, a comprehensive, holistic view of managing such events, and the effective use of technology. This guest editorial for this special issue of this TRANSACTIONS provides the raison d'ˆ etre for a new field of emergency management and engineering. It provides a systems view of emergency management, emphasizing the need for both pre- and postevent strategies and policies. The role of advanced communications and computing technologies, coupled with analytic procedures and models, is discussed. This paper concludes with the recognition of the need for emergency managers to be able to utilize these technologies.