Abstract: Elastic cables have been frequently used in variousengineering fields, such as civil engineering, space engineering, electricand communication engineering. In general, the mechanical model of a cableincludes an infinite number of degrees of freedom. The geometricnonlinearity in the cable movement usually makes the in-plane and out-of-planevibrations coupled with each other so that the cable dynamics may exhibit abundantnonlinear phenomena. Furthermore, a cable system is often subjected to theexternal excitations such as wind, rain, fluid, micro-gravity andalternative electro-magnetic fields, which definitely enhance the complexityof the cable dynamics. Therefore, the cable dynamics has drawn muchattention over the past decades. After a brief introduction to some typicalapplications of cables and related dynamics, this review presents the methodsof dynamic modeling of cable systems, surveys the recent advances indynamics analysis and vibration control for cable systems, and points out afew open problems to that should pay more attention.