Risk-Aware Cooperative Path Planning for Multi-UAV Maritime Offshore Emergency Missions Using a Modified Traffic Jam Optimizer

Multi-UAV cooperative path planning is an important technical basis for improving offshore emergency response efficiency in complex maritime environments. However, in complex offshore environments, cooperative trajectory planning is affected not only by geometric obstacles but also by wind disturbances, island terrain, restricted flight zones, and inter-UAV safety and communication constraints. These coupled factors make it difficult for conventional swarm intelligence optimizers to maintain risk awareness, local correction capability, and stable late-stage refinement. To address this problem, this paper proposes a risk-aware Modified Traffic Jam Optimizer for cooperative multi-UAV path planning in complex offshore missions. Unlike the original Traffic Jam Optimizer, the proposed method explicitly incorporates risk information into the population update process. A risk-opposition collaborative guidance strategy is designed to adjust the global search direction away from high-risk regions; a risk-based geometric multiscale adaptive mutation strategy is developed to identify and correct high-risk local control blocks; and a generalized quadratic interpolation decision-vector reconfiguration mechanism is introduced to refine the current best solution during stagnation or late-stage search. Two-UAV and three-UAV simulations are conducted using the constructed offshore environment and cooperative constraint models. The results show that the proposed method can generate feasible cooperative trajectories and achieve better performance than the comparison algorithms in path cost, path length, synchronized flight time, and convergence behavior. These results verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method for risk-aware multi-UAV cooperative path planning in complex offshore environments.