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The low-temperature cold start has become one of the leading technical bottlenecks limiting the large-scale commercial application of proton exchange membrane(PEM) fuel cells. This paper establishes the 1-D numerical model of the fuel cell stack to study the reactant gas, charge transfer, heat transfer, and water phase transition process. Then the critical parameters in the numerical model of the fuel cell stack are identified based on the cold start experiment data. The identification results show that the cold start model is consistent with the experimental results, and the model's output voltage and average temperature errors are under the acceptable range. Based on the numerical model, with the cold start time as the optimization objective and load current and initial membrane water content as the optimization variable, the cold start strategy is optimized under different ambient temperatures. The results show that the optimized current loading strategy can reduce the cold start time of the fuel cell stack and achieve a fast, successful cold start for −20 °C and − 25 °C conditions. The cold start time of the optimized cold start strategy is reduced by 42.2% compared with the strategy of step stair current under −20 °C. For the lower ambient temperature,-30 °C or below, to realize the successful cold start of fuel cell stacks, two aspects are needed: the redesign of the bipolar plate and endplate structure and the optimization of the cold start strategy. • The supercooled water phase change process is established based on JMAK theory. • Parameters identification and error analysis for the numerical model are conducted. • Initial membrane and segmented currents are optimized for the cold start strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]