Abstract-Reversible logic has applications in various research areas including lowpower design and quantum computation. In this paper, a rule-based optimization approach for reversible circuits is proposed which uses both negative and positive control Toffoli gates during the optimization. To this end, a set of rules for removing NOT gates and optimizing sub-circuits with common-target gates are proposed. To evaluate the proposed approach, the best-reported synthesized circuits and the results of a recent synthesis algorithm which uses both negative and positive controls are used. Our experiments reveal the potential of the proposed approach in optimizing synthesized circuits.