The vibration energy of suspension system transformed from the driving kinetic energy has significant influence on vehicle performance during the driving process. Therefore, the analysis of energy flow mechanism inside the active suspension system is of great significance for the research of vehicle ride comfort and system energy recovery. In this paper, different control strategies for electromagnetic active suspension are designed based on the system energy flow mechanism, so that the compatibility between ride comfort and energy recovery efficiency is achieved under different road conditions. In this mechanism, not only the energy transmission path inside suspension system is considered, but also the vibration energy induced by road roughness is investigated. Subsequently, overall system performance under different strategies and the corresponding energy flow are analyzed, and comprehensive correlation coefficient gamma is proposed to further evaluate performance varying. Furthermore, hardware-in-the loop experiment is also implemented to verify corresponding control strategy and the results demonstrate that the proposed strategies have advantages over traditional strategies with single performance optimization, which can reduce system energy consumption by at least 14.51% and recover 2.45% extra energy while outputting active force, and meanwhile the ride comfort improvement rate can reach at least 13.75% when energy is regenerated. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.