[en] Highlights: • The characteristics of a rotary engine are predicted by support vector machine model. • The coefficient of determination of the optimized models is greater than 0.98. • The effects of parameters on performance, combustion and emissions are studied. • The optimal thermal efficiency and nitrogen oxides are 18.12 % and 248.58 ppm. The purpose of current research was to implement an intelligent regression model and multi-objective optimization of performance, combustion and emissions characteristics for a hydrogen-enriched gasoline rotary engine. The brake thermal efficiency (BTE), fuel energy flow rate (E_f), nitrogen oxides (NO_X), carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrocarbon (HC) were predicted by intelligent regression model with hydrogen volume fraction (${\alpha }_{{\text{H}}_{\text{2}}}$), excess air ratio ($\lambda$) and ignition timing (IT) as independent variables. The intelligent regression models were based on support vector machine (SVM) and optimized by the genetic algorithm (GA) to obtain the optimal parameters of the regression model. The data for training the SVM model were derived from the experimental results of a hydrogen-enriched rotary engine, in which the speed was kept constant at 4500 r/min, the absolute manifold pressure remained at 35 KPa, the variation of ${\alpha }_{{\text{H}}_{\text{2}}}$, λ and IT were 0–6%, 1–1.3 and 24–42 °CA before top dead center (bTDC), respectively. After optimized by GA, the coefficient of determination of BTE, E_f, NO_X, CO and HC between the SVM model and the corresponding data were greater than 0.98, and the mean absolute percentage error were f, NO_X, CO and HC were considered for multi-objective optimization to obtain higher performance and lower emissions, and were solved using the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II. For this study, when the Pareto-optimal solutions were obtained, the optimal operating parameters were further obtained by limiting the performance and emissions parameters with the ${\alpha }_{{\text{H}}_{\text{2}}}$ of 5.06%, λ of 1.09%, and IT of 34.27 °CA bTDC.