Based on operation status assessment and self‐optimizing regulation, an optimization strategy for the smelting process of a fused magnesium furnace is proposed to improve the benefits of smelting magnesia. In the online evaluation stage, according to the qualitative information, the data is divided by the fuzzy model recognition method, and then the posterior probability of online data in different Gaussian mixture models is calculated to obtain the evaluation results. When the evaluation results are not optimal, the non‐optimal variables are obtained by calculating the contribution rate, and then the self‐optimizing adjustment is carried out by case search. In order to improve the recovery rate of self‐optimizing regulation, a time series prediction method is used to predict the operation status, and the corresponding operation schemes for different prediction results are proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed method is accurate and effective.