Oil & Gas companies continuously try to create and increase business value of their installations (platforms, refineries, etc). Particularly the increasing energy consumption on a worldwide basis and, as a result, the substantial increase in prices volatility is a major drive for better advanced control and optimization technologies. Advanced control and optimization system can play an important role to improve the profitability and stability of industrial plants. This paper discusses the problems and challenges of advanced control and optimization in petroleum industries nowadays. It emphasizes the importance of control performance assessment technology to maintain a good regulatory control and the difficulties in using these technologies. It also shows the importance of malfunction detection and diagnosis advisory system for critical equipment in order to increase the operational reliability. Model predictive control (MPC) has become a standard multivariable control solution in the continuous process industries, but there are still many open issues related to accelerate a new implementation and maintain the controller with a good performance along the years. Real time optimization tools also impose new challenges for Oil & Gas industries application, which are discussed in this paper.