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The objective of this paper is to show the design and application of pass temperature balance control system using an improved predictive functional control method in eight 800 tone/year USC ethylene cracking furnaces. The advanced pass temperature balance controller is developed using the proposed method and implemented in proprietary APC-ISYS software, which is connected to Yokogawa distributed control system via an OPC server. The advantage of it lies in the fact that the dynamics of pass temperature with nonlinearity and time delay are described by Takagi–Sugeno model and transformed into time-varying extended state space model, and thus, the proposed controller can regulate pass temperature based on the extended state space formulation. In addition, the control law with a linear iterative form, easily applied to industrial process, is derived. The robust analysis for the set point, input disturbance and output disturbance to the output verifies the ability of tracking and disturbance rejection of the proposed method. Application results from an industrial furnace are shown to be markedly better in terms of lower variability in the outlet temperature of both the passes compared to the current proportional–integral–derivative control scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]