Crude oil operations are an important part of petroleum supply chain, including multiple industrial processes such as crude oil procurement, crude oil distribution, crude oil transportation, crude oil storage and crude oil blending in the production process of refinery enterprises. The optimization of crude oil operation process has high academic theoretical value and industrial application value, and its related work is the currently focus of academia and industry at present. This paper is divided into three parts to summarize the research progress of crude oil operation process optimization. Firstly, this paper briefly describes the crude oil operation process, and analyzes the difficulties of its optimization problems. Secondly, from the three research perspectives of optimization model, optimization algorithm and uncertainty optimization method, this paper focuses on the four main research directions of crude oil procurement optimization, crude oil storage and transportation optimization, crude oil blending optimization, and crude oil operations optimization under uncertain conditions. Finally, this paper puts forward some suggestions on the current problems in the optimization of crude oil operation process, and prospects the future development direction and trend of this field.