Petroleum is one of the most important energy resources on the earth.It is also a kind of chemical raw material with high quality.Petroleum products could be found anywhere in our daily life.In recent years,due to the continualy increasing of nationwide crude oil processing capacity and the increasing difficulty of processing,more and more attention has been focused on the issue of rapid crude oil assay.Furthermore,with the density increasing of crude oil worldwide,the ratio of heavy oil processing in national refinery is increased,leading to more refined and effective processing requirements of heavy oil,so the rapid assay of heavy oil is also urgent.The crude oil assay means a comprehensive analysis on the processing performance of crude oil and the possible problems during the processing,which is based on the comprehensive analysis of the physical and chemical properties of crude oil.The traditional methods of crude oil assay are usually time consuming,high sample consuming and expensive,which is not suitable for the field application with high analytical requirements.The rapid development of computer technology and instrumental analysis techniques has set up a good platform for the rapid assay of crude oil.According to different analytical methods,in this paper,the developments of rapid analytical technologies in crude and heavy oil are reviewed,including near infrared-spectroscopy(NIR),infrared-pectroscopy(IR),nuclear-magnetic esonance(NMR) spectrometer and other popular analytical methods.