The operating conditions influence the stability and consumption of a blast furnace. Recognizing these conditions makes changing the burden distribution parameters more efficient. The cooling stave temperature (CST) is a crucial state parameter that indicates the conditions of the process. Owing to the high data volume of the CST and the lack of methods for recognizing the stability of the slag crust, it is difficult for operators to recognize the conditions accurately according to the CST during the ironmaking process. Thus, in this study, a condition recognition method with information granulation for burden distribution in a blast furnace was presented. First, information granulation was employed to reduce the volume of the CST data and present it in a granular form. Then, considering the lack of a method for calculating the similarity of CST information granules, a novel fuzzy similarity calculation method was devised to calculate the membership grades of information granules belonging to different standard granules. Finally, the conditions were recognized according to the membership values. Experimental results based on industrial data demonstrated that the proposed method can be used to recognizes the conditions in the blast furnace.

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