When performing the rescue mission, how to find a lost target in motion as soon as possible is a very valuable and interesting research topic. To find the optimal flight path of the UAV used to search the lost target in motion under different prior knowledge and interference intensity, this paper proposes a novel optimization technique called neural network algorithm with transfer learning and dropout (TLDNNA), which is a variant of neural network algorithm (NNA) inspired by artificial neural networks. To improve the global search ability and convergence performance of NNA, the multiple transfer mechanism, the generalized mean transfer position, and the random dropout operator driven by the principles of transfer learning and dropout are introduced to TLDNNA. To investigate the performance of TLDNNA, TLDNNA and 12 powerful population-based optimization algorithms are applied to the problem of using a UAV to search the lost target in motion in the designed 9 scenarios. Experimental results show that TLDNNA is remarkably better than the other 12 algorithms in most of the scenarios in terms of solution quality, stability, and convergence performance. In addition, TLDNNA can improve the overall search performance by 18.14% and overall computational efficiency by 3.41 times compared to NNA. The source code of TLDNNA can be obtained by https://github.com/jsuzyy/TLDNNA.
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