Abstract: This paper firstly addresses the progress on industrial control and the challenge we are faced with and furthermore summerizes the present status and existing problems concerning the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in control area.This study mainly presents the applications of AI to system modelling,state estimation,learning and optimization control based on the viewpoint as proposed by Fu and Saridis that intelligent control could be considered as a combination of AI,control theory and operations research,and the author's research practice in last few years.Moreover,a number of industrial application case studies and the computer simulation results are also given in this study.