Data Warehouse evolution is a critical problem in present scenario due to perpetual transactions and change in their structure arising out of continual evolving users' requirements. Handling properly all type of changes is a crucial process as it forms the core component of the modern DSS. Therefore DW has to be updated periodically according to different type of evolution of information sources. The problem of evolving an appropriate set of views is subjected to as the materialized view evolution problem. Many different materialized view evolution methods have been proposed in the literature to address this issue. This paper provides a survey of materialized view evolution methods. The paper aims at studying the materialized view evolution in relational databases and data warehouses as well as in a distributed setting. It defines an evolutionary approach for highlighting the materialized view evolution problem by identifying the three main dimensions that are the basis in the classification of materialized view evolution methods namely; (i) Framework, (ii) Architecture and (iii) Model/Design Model. This study reviews architecture based materialized view evolution methods, by identifying respective potentials and limits. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.