The disaster shelter can protect people from a disaster due to aseismatic structure, fireproof walls and strong windows. In Japan, since the salvation hut (“Osukui Goya” in Japanese) in the Edo Period appeared as the rudiment of disaster shelter), now more than 1000 cities or wards have set up shelters, and lots of cities and wards have formed shelter management manuals (ANICE, 2005). After the 1999 tornadoes (on January 21, 56 tornadoes struck Arkadelphia, Arkansan and on May 3, 68 tornadoes struck Oklahoma and Kansan) in USA, tornadoes and hurricane shelters were set up in many states, and several national guide documents such as FEMA 320 (FEMA, 1998), FEMA 361(FEMA, 2000) and ARC 4496 (American Red Cross, 2002), as well as some local guide documents (ACOAEMO, 2003) were published as the disaster shelter planning standard. With the increase of disaster preparedness and awareness, a large number of developing countries have also started to set up disaster shelters, for example in 2003 Beijing set up the first shelter in China, and till 2007 will set up another 18 (Rednet, 2004). Scientists and researchers are also starting to carry out shelter planning research, such as shelter location selection (Kongsomsaksakul et al, 2005) and shelter structure design or assessment for extreme wind events (Goulbourne et al, 2002; Pine et al, 2003). However, different countries, even different cities in a country, have different criteria of planning a disaster shelter. Therefore in this paper by reviewing and comparing some existing shelter planning, we intend to present a common framework for disaster shelter planning based on performance criteria developed from the view point of the “Vitae System” conceptual model proposed by Okada (2005).