Reanalysis is a fast computational method to predict the response of a modified structure based on the initial analysis results. Due to its advantages in efficiency, the reanalysis method has made significant progress in recent several decades. With the increase of requirements for computational performance in numerical methods, the reanalysis method should be a more important role in complex product design. Therefore, this paper investigates and discusses some characteristics of recent developed direct and approximation methods from the view of static, dynamical and nonlinear problems. Moreover, some suggestions for advancing the reanalysis method have been also given according to the state of the art reanalysis.