The scheduling of heating furnace has a direct impact on steel productivity in the steel rolling process. Because
furnace is a complex industrial process, manual operations is still widely used in the furnace scheduling. For the manual scheduling of heat furnace in steel enterprises, a method for scheduling is proposed for furnace plan control. The scheduling system is established, which is suitable for normal and abnormal operating conditions. The system consists of some modules, including the production plan, the intelligence pre-handled process data, the tracking inside the furnace, the available furnace capacity parameter, the shortest possible date of operation plan and earliest due date of operation plan, the ant colony algorithm, the operation plan made in both the normal operating conditions and the abnormal operating conditions. Finally, heating rate and billet lot number are yielded by scheduling model for control on line. The proposed scheduling method is successfully applied to some steel plant and significant result is obtained.