In order to assist designer in color planning during product development, a novel synthesized evaluation method is presented to evaluate color-combination schemes of multi-working modes products (MMPs). The proposed evaluation method considers color-combination images in different working modes as evaluating attributes, to which the corresponding weights are assigned for synthesized evaluation. Then a mathematical model is developed to search for optimal color-combination schemes of MMP based on the proposed evaluation method and two powerful search techniques known as Evolution Algorithms (EAs) and Swarm Intelligence (SI). In the experiments, we present a comparative study for two EAs, namely, Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Difference Evolution (DE), and one SI algorithm, namely, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), on searching for color-combination schemes of MMP problem. All of the algorithms are evaluated against a test scenario, namely, an Arm-type aerial work platform, which has two working modes. The results show that the DE obtains the superior solution than the other two algorithms for color-combination scheme searching problem in terms of optimization accuracy and computation robustness. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is feasible and efficient.