Abstract: Determining the technological indices of the roasting process in shaft furnace is difficult in not only the online measurement but also the modeling of their nonlinear and strong-coupling dynamic behavior in relation to the outputs from control loops to describe exactly the complexity that the process in varying with boundary conditions. To solve the problems of optimal operation/control of the roasting process in shaft furnace, a hardware-in-loop simulation (HILS) platform is developed with openness and modularity. It adopts the optimal operation/control strategy which is a two layered structure, i.e. the optimal operation layer and conventional control layer. The modules of the platform include mainly the optimal operation system, process monitoring system, programmable logic controller (PLC), virtual instruments and actuators, virtual plant system. Seamless integration features all the modules and their communication signals consist with in-site actual ones. Experiment results show the effectiveness of the platform.