The performance of data-driven models relies heavily on the amount and quality of training samples, so it might deteriorate significantly in the regions where samples are scarce. The objective of this paper is to develop an on-line SVR model updating strategy to track the change in the process characteristics efficiently with affordable computational burden. This is achieved by adding a new sample that violates the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions of the existing SVR model and by deleting the old sample that has the maximum distance with respect to the newly added sample in feature space. The benefits offered by such an updating strategy are exploited to develop an adaptive model-based control scheme, where model updating and control task perform alternately. The effectiveness of the adaptive controller is demonstrated by simulation study on a continuous stirred tank reactor. The results reveal that the adaptive MPC scheme outperforms its non-adaptive counterpart for large-magnitude set point changes and variations in process parameters. (C) 2014 Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China, and Chemical Industry Press. All rights reserved.