The novel permanent magnetic actuator (PMA) and its optimal design method were proposed in this paper. The proposed PMA is referred to as the separated permanent magnetic actuator (SPMA) and significantly superior in terms of its cost and performance level over a conventional PMA. The proposed optimal design method uses the evolutionary strategy algorithm (ESA), the kriging meta-model (KMM), and the multi-step optimization. The KMM can compensate the slow convergence of the ESA. The proposed multi-step optimization process, which separates the independent variables, can decrease time and increase the reliability for the optimal design result. Briefly, the optimization time and the poor reliability of the optimum are mitigated by the proposed optimization method.