Using a ball mill coal-pulverizing system as a motivating/application example, a class of complex industrial processes is investigated in this paper, which has strong couplings among loops, high nonlinearities and time-varying dynamics under different operation conditions. Focusing on such processes, an intelligent decoupling control method is developed, where the effects of nonlinearities are dealt with by neural network compensations and coupling effects are handled by specifically designed decoupling compensators, while the effect of time-varying dynamics is treated by a switching mechanism among multiple models. The stability and convergence of the closed-loop system are analyzed. The proposed method has been applied to the ball mill coal-pulverizing systems of 200 MW units in a heat power plant in China. Application results show that the system outputs are maintained in desired scopes, the electric energy consumption per unit coal has been reduced by 10.3%, and the production rate has been increased by 8%. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.