Hydrocracking is a crucial technology in the refining and petrochemical sectors. It is of great theoretical and practical significance to deeply understand the mechanism of hydrocracking reactions with the aid of reaction kinetics modeling. This paper recounted the research progress in the kinetic modeling of heavy oil distillation and hydrotreating and shows the methods for computing model parameters corresponding to the modeling method and predicting products. The study showed that the reaction kinetics modeling evolved from the decentralized lumped model based on the distillation range from a macroscopic perspective to a continuous lumped model based on production scenarios and then to a complicated microscopic lumped model at the molecular level. In addition, the study compared the advantages and disadvantages of various models in terms of their capacity to reliably predict the composition of products, the intricacy of parameter estimation, rate coefficients, feed dependence, and experimental data required. It also explained the industrial applicability of the lumped model as well as the construction and method for solving molecular hierarchical reaction networks in molecular lumps. Finally, it gives the development prospects of the lumped kinetic model according to the modeling difficulties, the computing power of computers, and the analysis of technology development trends.