The quality requirements for thickness accuracy in cold rolling continue to become more stringent, particularly in response to exacting design specification from automotive customers. One of the major impacts from the tighter tolerance level is more unusable product on the head end and tail end of tandem mill coils when the mill is in transition to or from steady state rolling condition. A strip thickness control system for a tandem cold steel rolling mills is composed with blocked non-interacting controller and controllers for strip thickness and tension control of each rolling stands. An intelligent mathematical model included an elastic deformation of strip has been developed and applied to the field in order to predict the rolling force. The simulated results showed that the effect of elastic recovery should be included the model, even if the effect of elastic compression was not important.