Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is established by imitating the human brain's nerve thinking mode. Because of its strong nonlinear mapping ability, fault tolerance and self-learning ability, it is widely used in many fields such as intelligent driving, signal processing, process control and so on. This article introduces the basic principles, development history and three common neural network types of artificial neural networks, BP neural network, RBF neural network and convolutional neural network, focusing on the research progress of the practical application of neural networks in chemical process optimization.