With the development trend of electrification and intelligence of vehicle powertrains, automotive products are becoming increasingly competitive and vehicle powertrain development cycles are becoming shorter and shorter. In addition, stringent emission regulations and tight development times require higher efficiency, precision and quality calibration and optimized iterations of the control parameters of the powertrain electronic control system to improve overall powertrain performance. The increasing number of calibration parameters in modern powertrain makes the calibration of powertrain a new challenge. This paper focuses on the development and trends of calibration methods and tools, analyzes the development trend from manual calibration, automatic calibration to virtual calibration, summarizes the application of optimization algorithms in calibration of powertrain system, and looks into the further development of powertrain control parameter calibration in the future.