As the core and fault prone part of rotating machinery,rolling bearing and its fault diagnosis are the focus and frontier of current research.The effective feature extraction method is very important for the fault diagnosis of rolling bearing,and the variational mode decomposition algorithm (VMD) has a good application potential because of its strong analysis ability and adaptability to complex signals.The basic principle and advantages of VMD,the application of VMD in bearing fault feature extraction,VMD parameter optimization methods and the latest progress were summarized.A new solution to the VMD parameter optimization problem was proposed from the aspects of fitness function construction and group intelligence algorithm improvement.The shortcomings of VMD in diagnosing early weak fault and compound fault of rolling bearing were discussed.The future development direction of VMD was prospected from the perspective of theoretical research and engineering application,which can provide reference for relevant researchers in fault diagnosis of rolling bearing.