Controlling circumferential variability in a blast furnace may include generating a predictive model that sets up a relationship between a standard deviation of a selected state variable, state variables and one or more control variables in blast furnace operation for predicting the standard deviation. A number of circumferential sections of the blast furnace is defined, and the predictive model associated with the selected state variable for each of the circumferential sections is trained based on process data of the blast furnace. A plurality trained predictive models is generated associated with different circumferential sections and different selected state variables. One or more future control variable set points that minimize a sum of the plurality of predictive models, is determined. One or more future control variable set points is transmitted to a control system to control the blast furnace operation.