The future air transport market has put forward higher requirement for large civil aircraft. Adopting BWB (blended-wing-body) configuration has become the potential development direction to improve the comprehensive performance of future civil aircraft, which has attracted extensive attention from major aircraft manufactures and scientific research institutes. From the configuration evolution, program promotion and maturity improvement of key technologies, this paper discusses in detail the exploration and research work in the field of BWB design in European and American countries. This paper focuses on the analysis of several mainstream schemes in the American N+2/N+3 program and the fifth framework program of the European Union, and expounds some involved significant problems, such as serialized design, emergency evacuation, power integration and aerodynamic design, and introduces the solutions and ideas of each scheme for the above problems. Finally, the challenges faced by the application of BWB in future large civil aircraft was summarized, and the development trend and prospect of BWB configuration were prospected. The research content of this paper has certain reference value for the development of new configuration scheme of future civil aircraft in China.