The design procedure for an adaptive power management control strategy, based on a driving pattern recognition algorithm is proposed. The design goal of the control strategy is to minimize fuel consumption and engine-out NOx and PM emissions on a set of diversified driving schedules. Six representative driving patterns (RDP) are designed to represent different driving scenarios. For each RDP, the Dynamic Programming (DP) technique is used to find the global optimal control actions. Implementable, sub-optimal control algorithms are then extracted by analyzing the behavior of the DP control actions. A driving pattern recognition (DPR) algorithm is subsequently developed and used to classify the current driving pattern into one of the RDPs; thus, the most appropriate control algorithm is selected adaptively. This 'multi-mode' control scheme was tested on several driving cycles and was found to work satisfactorily.