A review of the research on soil cutting in recent years was given, and three different methods for dealing with large deformation in soil cutting including adaptive meshing method, arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian(ALE) method, and smoothed particle hydrodynamics(SPH) method were introduced. Based on these three methods, a simplified 3-D finite elements model was then constructed for simulation of soil cutting by the shield cutter. After that, with an emphasis laid on the ALE method, a full 3-D finite element model has been constructed for simulation of soil cutting by the shield cutter head and cutter. Final calculation was accomplished by using LS-DYNA 970 MPP software on the DAWNING 4000A supercomputer. Calculation results showed different characteristics of these three methods when dealing with the large deformation in soil cutting through corresponding analysis and comparison. Meanwhile, it is also found that some simulation results such as moment in soil cutting by the shield cutter head and cutter were in good accordance to the experimental data.