Maritime UAV path planning is a key link in realizing the intelligence of maritime emergency transportation, providing key support for fast and flexible maritime accident disposal and emergency material supply. However, most of the current UAV path planning methods are designed for land environments and lack the ability to cope with complex marine environments. In order to achieve effective path planning for UAV in marine environments, this paper proposes a Directional Drive-Rotation Invariant Quadratic Interpolation White Shark Optimization algorithm (DD-RQIWSO). First, the directional guidance of speed is realized through a directional update strategy based on the fitness value ordering, which improves the speed of individuals approaching the optimal solution. Second, a rotation-invariant update mechanism based on hyperspheres is added to overcome the tracking pause phenomenon in WSO. In addition, the quadratic interpolation strategy is added to enhance the utilization of local information by the algorithm. Then, a wind simulation environment based on the Lamb–Oseen vortex model was constructed to better simulate the real scenario. Finally, DD-RQIWSO was subjected to a series of tests in 2D and 3D scenarios, respectively. The results show that DD-RQIWSO is able to realize path planning under wind environments more accurately and stably.

Underwater localization is considered a critical technique in the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUTs). However, acquiring accurate location information is challenging due to the heterogeneous underwater environment and the hostile propagation of acoustic signals, especially when using received signal strength (RSS)-based techniques. Additionally, most current solutions rely on strict mathematical expressions, which limits their effectiveness in certain scenarios. To address these challenges, this study develops a quantum-behaved meta-heuristic algorithm, called quantum enhanced Harris hawks optimization (QEHHO), to solve the localization problem without requiring strict mathematical assumptions. The algorithm builds on the original Harris hawks optimization (HHO) by integrating four strategies into various phases to avoid local minima. The initiation phase incorporates good point set theory and quantum computing to enhance the population quality, while a random nonlinear technique is introduced in the transition phase to expand the exploration region in the early stages. A correction mechanism and exploration enhancement combining the slime mold algorithm (SMA) and quasi-oppositional learning (QOL) are further developed to find an optimal solution. Furthermore, the RSS-based Cramér–Raolower bound (CRLB) is derived to evaluate the effectiveness of QEHHO. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of QEHHO under various conditions compared to other state-of-the-art closed-form-expression- and meta-heuristic-based solutions.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide efficient and flexible means for maritime emergency rescue, with path planning being a critical technology in this context. Most existing unmanned device research focuses on land-based path planning in two-dimensional planes, which fails to fully leverage the aerial advantages of UAVs and does not accurately describe offshore environments. Therefore, this paper establishes a three-dimensional offshore environmental model. The UAV’s path in this environment is achieved through a novel swarm intelligence algorithm, which is based on the coati optimization algorithm (COA). New strategies are introduced to address potential issues within the COA, thereby solving the problem of UAV path planning in complex offshore environments. The proposed OCLCOA introduces a dynamic opposition-based search to address the population separation problem in the COA and incorporates a covariance search strategy to enhance its exploitation capabilities. To simulate the actual environment as closely as possible, the environmental model established in this paper considers three environmental factors: offshore flight-restricted area, island terrain, and sea winds. A corresponding cost function is designed to evaluate the path length and path deflection and quantify the impact of these three environmental factors on the UAV. Experimental results verify that the proposed algorithm effectively solves the UAV path planning problem in offshore environments.

Accurate offshore wind speed forecasting is crucial for ensuring stable energy production and safe offshore operations. However, the strong nonlinearity, non-stationarity, and chaotic behavior of offshore wind speed series make precise prediction extremely difficult. To overcome these difficulties, a two-stage synergistic prediction framework is proposed. In the first stage, a multi-strategy Black-winged Kite Algorithm (MBKA) is designed, incorporating quantum population initialization, improved migration behavior, and oppositional–mutual learning to reinforce global optimization performance under complex coastal conditions. On this basis, an entropy-driven adaptive Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) method is implemented, where MBKA optimizes decomposition parameters using envelope entropy as the objective function, thereby improving decomposition robustness and mitigating parameter sensitivity. In the second stage, the denoised intrinsic mode functions are used to train an adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), whose membership function parameters are optimized by MBKA to enhance nonlinear modeling capability and prediction generalization. Finally, the proposed framework is evaluated using offshore wind speed data from two coastal regions in Shanghai and Fujian, China. Experimental comparisons with multiple state-of-the-art models demonstrate that the MBKA–VMD–ANFIS framework yields notable performance improvements, reducing RMSE by 57.14% and 30.68% for the Fujian and Shanghai datasets, respectively. These results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in delivering superior accuracy and robustness for offshore wind speed forecasting.

Accurate forecasting of offshore wind speed is crucial for the efficient operation and planning of wind energy systems. However, the inherently non-stationary and highly volatile nature of wind speed, coupled with the sensitivity of neural network-based models to parameter settings, poses significant challenges. To address these issues, this paper proposes an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) optimized by CRGWAA. The proposed CRGWAA integrates Chebyshev mapping initialization, an elite-guided reflection refinement operator, and a generalized quadratic interpolation strategy to enhance population diversity, adaptive exploration, and local exploitation capabilities. The performance of CRGWAA is comprehensively evaluated on the CEC2022 benchmark function suite, where it demonstrates superior optimization accuracy, convergence speed, and robustness compared to six state-of-the-art algorithms. Furthermore, the ANFIS-CRGWAA model is applied to short-term offshore wind speed forecasting using real-world data from the offshore region of Fujian, China, at 10 m and 100 m above sea level. Experimental results show that the proposed model consistently outperforms conventional and hybrid baselines, achieving lower MAE, RMSE, and MAPE, as well as higher R², across both altitudes. Specifically, compared to the original ANFIS-WAA model, the RMSE is reduced by approximately 45% at 10 m and 24% at 100 m. These findings confirm the effectiveness, stability, and generalization ability of the ANFIS-CRGWAA model for complex, non-stationary offshore wind speed prediction tasks.

Cooperative path planning in complex coastal mountainous environments near the shore is a knowledge-intensive engineering task crucial for demanding multi-UAV operations such as disaster rescue, environmental monitoring, and coastal emergency response. However, the complex coupling constraints in 3D space make it a challenging high-dimensional optimization problem where traditional metaheuristics often suffer from undirected blind exploration and invalid trial and error. To overcome these limitations, we propose the deep neural network-guided phototropic growth algorithm (DNN-PGA), an engineering informatics framework that deeply couples explicit spatial knowledge representation with traditional heuristic search mechanisms. Specifically, we implement a spatial prior generation method to transform unstructured 3D environmental data into structured knowledge distributions. We utilize deep neural networks to extract spatial heatmap priors from multi-channel voxel representations, serving as a formal representation of potential high-quality path regions. Subsequently, the core search operator of PGA is reconstructed by deploying these explicit spatial priors as structural constraints to strictly guide engineering decision-making. Within the DNN-PGA, a neural network-guided initialization mechanism ensures efficient spatial focusing of the initial population. Secondly, a neural control golden-sine strategy was designed to enable dynamic regulation of local exploitation intensity, and a neural limited lens opposition-based learning mechanism was developed to accurately guide individuals out of local optima using learned spatial knowledge. Extensive experiments confirm that the DNN-PGA achieves an average reduction of 29.49% in mean path cost compared with the best-performing competing algorithm across all scenarios under complex operational conditions. Ultimately, the DNN-PGA successfully establishes a highly robust, knowledge-driven practical solution for demanding 3D multi-UAV cooperative path planning tasks in coastal mountainous environments.