An appropriate energy management strategy is able to further improve the fuel economy of PHEVs. The rule-based energy management algorithms are dominated in industry due to their fast computation and ease of establishment potentials, however, their performance differ a lot from improper setting of parameters and control actions. This paper employs the dynamic programming (DP) to locate the optimal actions for the engine in PHEVs, and more importantly, proposes a recalibration method to improve the performance of the rule-based energy management through the results calculated by DP algorithm. Eventually, an optimization-based rule development procedure is presented and further validated by hardware-in-loop (HIL) simulation experiments. The HIL simulation results show that, the improved rule-based energy management strategy reduces fuel consumption per 100 km from 25.46 L diesel to 22.80 L diesel. The main contribution of this study is to explore a novel way to calibrate the existed heuristic control strategy with the global optimization result through advanced intelligent algorithms. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.