With the development of modern technology and economy, environmental protection and sustainable development have become the focus of global attention. In this paper, the promotion and development of electric vehicles have bright prospects, and they are also facing many challenges. Under different operating conditions, various safety problems of electric vehicles are emerging one after another, especially the potential safety hazards caused by battery overheating are threatening the development process of electric vehicles. In this paper, a new type of indirect liquid cooling system is designed and optimized for cylindrical lithium-ion batteries, and a variety of design schemes for different cooling channel structures and cooling liquid inlet direction are proposed, and the corresponding solid-fluid coupling model is established. COMSOL Multiphysics simulation software models, simulates and analyses cooling systems. In order to optimize the system and improve the optimization efficiency, the Kriging method is used to construct an approximation model of the thermal management system, and the influencing factors sensitivity analysis and optimization design of the thermal management system are also conducted. The results show that there has a significant influence on the maximum temperature and temperature difference of the battery system. According to the optimization design of these factors based on the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II), it is found that the optimized thermal management system has the best ability to dissipate heat and maintain temperature uniformity as compared to the original design. In addition, this optimization system has the ability to prevent thermal runaway propagation under the condition of thermal abuse conditions. With these prominent performances, the proposed method is expected to provide insights into the engineering design and optimization of the battery thermal management system for electric vehicle.