The implementation of fuel cell vehicles requires a supervisory control strategy that manages the power distribution between the fuel cell and the energy storage device. Some of the current problems with power management strategies are: fuel efficiency optimization methods require prior knowledge of the driving cycle before they can be implemented, the impact on the fuel cell and battery life cycle are not considered and finally, there are no standardized measures to evaluate the performance of different control methods. In addition to that, the performances of different control methods for power management have not been directly compared using the same mathematical models. The proposed work will present a different optimization approach that uses fuel mass flow rate instead of fuel mass consumption as the cost function and thus, it can be done instantaneously and does not require knowledge of the driving cycle ahead of time. Also this study presents an experimental approach to validate the mathematical simulation results. (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.