Abstract: The developments and state-of-art of oil spill modeling is summarized, focusing primarily in the recentyears.Oil spill model is a complex system including different numbers of sub-modules, which are used to simulate the transport and fate of spilled oil in and on the water respectively.Typically, it has three main modules:input module, transport module and fate module.More attention is paid on the methods of oil transport module and fate module.The commonly-used numerical methods are evaluated, such as Eulerian, Lagrangian and Eulerian-Lagrangian approach, especially for the Lattice Boltzmann method.