Surface induction heating is nowadays widely used with coil arrangement varied according to the work piece topology. For a flat work piece arrangement, the coil may be of the single-conductor type or single-coil type, and finally, it may be of multicoil type. It is thought that the development of a generalized approach to analyze all three possible excitation systems mentioned earlier is an important task. In this paper, a generalized approach using a multilayer electromagnetic model is presented to analyze all three possible excitation arrangements. The theoretical results are compared with the experimental findings and with theoretical results obtained using other approaches.