The control objective of the forced-circulation evaporation process of alumina production is not only to avoid large fluctuations of the level, but also to ensure the product density to track its setpoint quickly. Due to the existence of strong coupling between the level loop and the product density loop, and high nonlinearities in the process, the conventional control strategy cannot achieve satisfactory control performance, and thus the production demand cannot be met. In this paper, an intelligent decoupling PID controller including conventional PID controllers, a decoupling compensator and a neural feedforward compensator is proposed. The parameters of such controller are determined by generalized predictive control law. Real-time experiment results show that the proposed method can decouple the loops effectively and thus improve the evaporation efficiency. (C) 2015 The Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China, and Chemical Industry Press. All rights reserved.