Reheating furnace is an important device with complex dynamic characteristics in steel plants. The temperature tracing control of reheating furnace has great importance both to the quality of slabs and energy saving. A model-based control strategy,multivariable constrained control (MCC) for the reheating furnace control is used. With this control method, the furnace is treated as a six-input-six-output general model with loops coupled in nature. Compared with the traditional control, the proposed control strategy gets better temperature tracing accuracy and exhibits some energy saving feature. The simulation results show that the performance of the furnace is greatly improved.