Abstract: The application of innovative technologies in aerospace, such as the laminar flow control, composite materials, and fully electric propulsion, brings new challenges to traditional anti-/de-icing methods in recent years. The new concept of anti-/de-icing based on high voltage driven surface dielectric barrier discharge (SDBD) plasma actuators which have no complicated mechanical structures nor potential aerodynamic loss, has the great potential to be applied to the next-generation flight vehicle. The present study reviews the anti-/de-icing technique using SDBD plasma actuators from three aspects, i.e. in-flight icing mechanism and available anti-/de-icing approaches, characteristics of the plasma aerodynamics and the thermal actuation effect, and anti-/de-icing applications using SDBD plasma actuators. It is pointed out that the key scientific issues in the research of anti-/de-icing using plasma actuators mainly include the following: 1) multi-physics coupling mechanism, especially the plasma aerodynamics and thermal actuation effect as the two main factors; 2) evolution and mechanism of non-equilibrium phase transition of multi-physics during the anti-/de-icing process. Those scientific issues include many frontier areas in fluid mechanics, such as the physical properties of plasma, flow control mechanism, in-flight icing mechanism, and anti-/de-icing rules. The difficulty of the research of plasma anti-/de-icing lies in the coupling of multiple physical fields and multiple time scales. Numerical simulation methods and experimental measurement techniques can lead to critical breakthroughs in solving these issues. Mechanism exploration of anti-/de-icing by SDBD plasma actuators and solutions to technical problems faced by engineering applications are the future research directions that need to be focused on.