Lithium-ion batteries are widely adopted as the power supplies for electric vehicles. A key but challenging issue is to achieve optimal battery charging, while taking into account of various constraints for safe, efficient and reliable operation. In this paper, a triple-objective function is first formulated for battery charging based on a coupled thermoelectric model. An advanced optimal charging strategy is then proposed to develop the optimal constant-current-constant-voltage (CCCV) charge current profile, which gives the best trade-off among three conflicting but important objectives for battery management. To be specific, a coupled thermoelectric battery model is first presented. Then, a specific triple-objective function consisting of three objectives, namely charging time, energy loss, and temperature rise (both the interior and surface), is proposed. Heuristic methods such as Teaching-learning-based-optimization (TLBO) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) are applied to optimize the triple-objective function, and their optimization performances are compared. The impacts of the weights for different terms in the objective function are then assessed. Experimental results show that the proposed optimal charging strategy is capable of offering desirable effective optimal charging current profiles and a proper trade-off among the conflicting objectives. Further, the proposed optimal charging strategy can be easily extended to other battery types. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.