The powertrain model of the series-parallel plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) is more complicated, compared with series PHEVs and parallel PHEVs. Using the traditional dynamic programming (DP) algorithm or Pontryagin minimum principle (PMP) algorithm to solve the global-optimization-based energy management strategies of the series-parallel PHEVs is not ideal, as the solution time is too long or even impossible to solve. Chief engineers of hybrid system urgently require a handy tool to quickly solve global-optimization-based energy management strategies. Therefore, this paper proposed to use the Radau pseudospectral knotting method (RPKM) to solve the global-optimization-based energy management strategy of the series-parallel PHEVs to improve computational efficiency. Simulation results showed that compared with the DP algorithm, the global-optimization-based energy management strategy based on the RPKM improves the computational efficiency by 1806 times with a relative error of only 0.12%. On this basis, a bi-level nested component-sizing method combining the genetic algorithm and RPKM was developed. By applying the global-optimization-based energy management strategy based on RPKM to the actual development, the feasibility and superiority of RPKM applied to the global-optimization-based energy management strategy of the series-parallel PHEVs were further verified.