A well-designed control system with a high utilization ratio of hydrogen and a fast filling speed are two critical objectives to ensure the reduction of cost and time required in the refueling process. In this paper, the popular three-stage refueling process is modeled with the aim to address both objectives. Using the real gas law of hydrogen, the utilization ratio of hydrogen filling is analyzed and the filling flowrate and time of each stage are evaluated. A multi-objective iterative optimization model is established and an optimization algorithm for the filling process is proposed to achieve both fast refueling and high utilization. Numerical results can be applied to the optimization of an actual hydrogen filling process. Besides, the tests show that an optimized control method can significantly improve the utilization ratio and allow refueling in a widely acceptable time. (C) 2009 Professor T. Nejat Veziroglu. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.