In practice, the short-term scheduling job of oil refinery processes is still done manually by planners, because of the lack of such tools. This paper briefly reviews the theoretic research advancement in this field. It shows that although some progress has been made, the techniques obtained are not applicable in practice. Thus, the future research trends in this field should focus on methods that can bridge the gap between theory and applications. Based on the review, this paper concludes that it may be helpful if the problem is studied in a viewpoint of control theory and hence, solved by combining enumeration and heuristic instead of using mathematical programming formulations.