The development of hybrid vehicles is nowadays a new challenge for the automotive industry since it appears a relevant solution to reach the next ten years pollution standards. The new advantages which could be achieved by hybrid architectures of powertrains are generally difficult to study. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a novel methodology based on an inverse approach that provide an help at the design and analysis stages of such type of systems. It allows to define in a first step the admissible architecture of the powertrain according to the objectives of the design, and in a second step to compare different solutions using the same references in a multi-objective context. The proposed approach is here detailed considering the study of the requirements for the powertrain architecture of a hybrid vehicle in order to achieve some consumption criteria on a standard road cycle.