Nowadays, more and more field devices are connected to the central controller through a serial communication network such as fieldbus or industrial Ethernet. Some of these serial communication networks like controller area network (CAN) or industrial Ethernet will introduce random transfer delays into the networked control systems (NCS), which causes control performance degradation and even system instability. To address this problem, the adaptive predictive functional control algorithm is derived by applying the concept of predictive functional control to a discrete state space model with variable delay. The method of estimating the networkinduced delay is also proposed to facilitate the control algorithm implementing. Then, an NCS simulation research based on TrueTime simulator is carried out to validate the proposed control algorithm. The numerical simulations show that the proposed adaptive predictive functional control algorithm is effective for NCS with random delays. Nowadays, more and more field devices are connected to the central controller through a serial communication network such as fieldbus or industrial Ethernet. Some of these serial communication networks like controller area network (CAN) or industrial Ethernet will introduce random transfer delays into the networked control systems (NCS), which causes control performance degradation and even system instability. To address this problem, the adaptive predictive functional control algorithm is derived by applying the concept of predictive functional control to a discrete state space model with variable delay. The method of estimating the numerical simulations show that the proposed adaptive predictive functional control algorithm is effective for NCS with random delays.