Since hot-rolled strip laminar cooling (HSLC) process is a large-scale, nonlinear system, a distributed model predictive control (DMPC) framework is proposed for computational reason and enhancing the precision and flexibility of control system. The overall system is divided into several interconnected subsystems and each subsystem is controlled by local model predictive control (MPC). These local MPCs cooperate with its neighbours through the scheme of neighbourhood optimization for the improvement of global performance. The state space representation of each subsystem's prediction model is designed by finite volume method firstly, and then is linearized around the current operating point at each step to overcome the computational obstacle of nonlinear model. Moreover, since the strip temperature is measurable only at a few positions in water cooling section due to the difficult ambient conditions, an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is used to estimate the transient temperature of strip. Both simulation and experiment results prove the efficiency of the proposed method. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.