The theory and application of cylindrical error evaluation are studied, the planning model of cylindrical error evaluation is established, the minimum condition criterion for error evaluation is discussed, the modified simplex method for directly solving the programming model is proposed, and the steps of solving it are given. Finally, the error evaluation of the actual measurement data is carried out, and the results show that the method has high accuracy and speed. In addition, this evaluation method has strong versatility and provides a reference for solving other shape errors.