This paper deals with the development of an interface program for automatic plate forming, which can exchange information between the heating line information generation program and the automatic heating apparatus. In this paper, the performance of the developed interface program has been verified from the view point of numerical position control. By applying the interface program to the operation of the automatic heating apparatus, an experiment of line heating has been conducted for several steel plate models. Based on the experimental results, a simplified relation to estimate angular distortion has keen derived as a natural characteristic of the present automatic heating apparatus. As a result of the present study, the prototype of the automatic plate forming system has been constructed, and its application to the real surface models found in the ship will be presented in the near future.