Abstract: Situational awareness is an important method for ensuring secure, reliable, and economic operation of active distribution networks. Recently, with the development of electrical data acquisition and big data technologies, researchers have extensively studied the data-driven situational awareness of active distribution networks for various applications. This study analyzes the data-driven situational awareness problem of active distribution networks to provide an overall research framework. Relevant research was reviewed from four perspectives: situational perception, comprehension, projection, and orientation. In addition, research on situational awareness of an active distribution network cyber-physical system（CPS） was analyzed and discussed. Finally, this paper summarizes the existing methods, analyzes their shortcomings and challenges, and puts forward emphasis and directions for future research.