A thermal-solid-liquid complex operational environment induces structural interface developing a typical coupling sliding/impact wear behavior. It results in contact damage until sys-tems fail, which may cause significant economic losses and catastrophic consequences. The key point of solving this problem is to reveal the coupling damage mechanism of the sliding/impact behavior in typical systems and life characterization under a complicate evolving environment. This has been a hot topic in the area of mechanical reliability. The main work in this paper can be con-cluded as follows. Firstly, the main industries in which the sliding/impact behaviortakes place have been introduced. Then, existing studies on the wear mechanism and degree analysis are pre-sented, which includes surface morphology analysis, wear debris analysis, and wear degree measure-ment. Meanwhile, existing problems in theoretical modeling and experiments in current research are summarized, so as to point out a bright direction for future research on wear prediction. They include interface contact modeling, mathematic coupling mechanism modeling, wear equation establishment, and wear life characterization, which can provide some new ideas for improving the existing studies on the sliding/impact wear behavior.