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Millions of three-wheelers in large cities of Asia and Africa contribute to the already increasing urban air pollutants. An emerging method to reduce adverse effects of the growing three-wheeler fleet is hybrid-electric technology. The overall efficiency of a hybrid electric vehicle heavily depends on the power management strategy used in controlling the main powertrain components of the vehicle. Recent studies highlight the need for a comprehensive report on developing an easy-to-implement and efficient control strategy for hybrid electric three-wheelers. Thus, in the present study, a design methodology for a rule-based supervisory controller of a pre-transmission parallel hybrid three-wheeler based on an optimal control strategy (i.e., dynamic programming) is proposed. The optimal control problem for minimizing fuel, emissions (i.e., HC, CO and NOx) and gear shift frequency are solved using dynamic programming (DP). Numerical issues of DP are analyzed and trade-offs between optimizing objectives are presented. Since DP strategy cannot be implemented as a real-time controller, useful strategies are extracted to develop the proposed rule-based strategy. The developed rule-based strategy show performance within 10% of the DP results on WLTC and UDC-NEDC drive cycles and has the clear advantage of being near-optimal, easy-to-implement and computationally less demanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]