This article proposes a system for monitoring a blast furnace operation based on DB-Mini-KMeans and multi-layer perceptron (MLP), which solves a difficult problem categorising the furnace operation types. The system uses the correlation between cooling wall temperature and furnace operation type, creates an furnace operation type recognition model with optimised K-Means and MLP algorithms and makes a comparison test with other recognition models; evaluates all kinds of operation types by combining six blast furnace production indexes, such as gas utilisation rate and airflow and establishes a monitoring system of furnace operation types in blast furnaces. The clustering performance of the system has been improved by nearly 40%, and the recognition accuracy of various operation types has reached more than 90%, covering functions such as two-dimensional schematic diagrams of furnace operation types and status warnings, which provide help and support for people to analyse furnace conditions.