A Trajectory Planning Method for UAVs in Dynamic Multi-Threat Environments Based on a Dynamic Multi-Objective Crow Search Algorithm

Abstract

Trajectory planning, which determines a route from a starting position to a target position within a given airspace, is critical to unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) mission execution. Many existing meta-heuristic approaches to three-dimensional (3D) trajectory planning aggregate competing requirements into a weighted cost and may suffer from limited adaptability when the environment changes. This paper formulates 3D UAV trajectory planning in dynamic multi-threat environments as a dynamic bi-objective optimization problem and proposes a multi-swarm dynamic multi-objective crow search algorithm (MDMCSA). The proposed method organizes objective-oriented swarms within a cooperative search framework and facilitates information exchange through archive sharing, thereby coordinating the search process among different objectives. The memory-time and diverse behavior strategies adjust search behaviors and solution perturbation to balance convergence and diversity. A hybrid change response strategy combines historical information reuse with diversity restoration after dynamic changes. Comparative experiments on dynamic benchmark problems and UAV trajectory planning scenarios demonstrate competitive convergence and adaptation performance, together with a favorable trade-off between solution quality and computational cost. Incremental ablation and parameter-sensitivity analyses further indicate the cumulative benefit of the integrated design and the stable performance of the selected parameter configuration across the tested settings.