Due to the characteristics of light weight and high strength, weakly-rigid thin-walled workpieces are widely used in aerospace, automobile and other industrial fields, but they also have the disadvantages of small thickness, low rigidity and easily deformation during the manufacturing process. The fixture layout design is a very important factor to reduce the deformation and ensure the quality of thin-walled workpieces. Traditional fixture layout design of thinwalled workpieces depends on the intuitive judgment and experience accumulation of engineers, which is slow, high cost and large randomness of design. With the continuous improvement of computer technology, many scholars applied finite element simulation, mathematical programming method, intelligent optimization algorithm, surrogate model and so on to optimize the layout of thin-walled workpieces fixture components, and have obtained a lot of research results. According to the modeling method of objective function and the optimization algorithm, the related researches are systematically classified and discussed, and the merit and demerit of each modeling method and optimization algorithm are analyzed in detail. Finally, the related researches on the fixture layout optimization method of weakly-rigid thin-walled workpieces are summarized, and the corresponding research advice are put forward.