Modular exponentiation and scalar multiplication are important operations of most public key cryptosystems, and their fast calculation is essential to improve the system efficiency. The shortest addition chain is one of the most important mathematical concepts to realize the optimization. However, finding a shortest addition chain of length k is an NP-hard problem, whose time complexity is comparable to O($k!$). This paper proposes some novel methods to generate short addition chains. We firstly present a Simplified Power-tree method by deeply deleting the power-tree, whose time complexity is reduced to O($k^2$) sacrificing some increasing of the addition chain length. Moreover, a Cross Window method and its variant are introduced by improving the Window method. More precisely, the Cross Window method uses the cross correlation to deal with the windows and its pre-computation is optimized by the Addition Sequence algorithm. The theoretical analysis is conducted to show the correctness and effectiveness. Meanwhile, the experiment shows that the new methods can obtain shorter addition chains compared to the existing methods. The Cross Window method with the Addition Sequence algorithm can attain 9.5% reduction of the addition chain length, in the best case, compared to the Window method.