In this paper, we provide a review of concepts and developments in operating procedure synthesis (OPS), starting from its early development through to its current state. Operating procedure synthesis is a problem in which a set of equipment manipulations and their orderings must be generated to take the process from an initial state to a goal state. While there has been ongoing research for about 30 years in this area, only a few systems have been reported to be industrially deployed. The approach taken in this paper is, first, to describe the problem in general terms; second, to discuss previous work in this area; and, finally, to present ideas and directions for future work.