Abstract Large-scale system approach to modern technical, organizational, economical and social problems is constantly spreading out. Industrial, energy, water, ecology, urban, medical, agriculture, transport and other systems, are in urgent need of theoretical as well as applied results on optimization and control of large-scale systems. Unfortunately, the progress in this field is not satisfactory due to many reasons. Optimization and suboptimization approach to problems of large-scale system has remained an important field of research. New results on structure optimization and decomposition have been obtained. Several motivied supervisory control algorithms, mostly for two-level systems, have been given. The paper present a survey of recent results on control problems and optimization of large-scale systems. Possible future trends in this area are considered.