Anti-submarine warfare is one of the main combat missions of surface naval warship in modern naval warfare. Submarine search is an important part of surface warship anti-submarine warfare and is the prerequisite and guarantee for the implementation of anti-submarine attack. Aiming at the conventional multi-ships extend position call search method has low search efficiency and weak coordination ability, the cooperative path optimization of the existing two kinds of multi-ship search methods is carried out. According to the principle of naval sonar search and the application of actual anti-submarine tactics, the mathematical programming model of two kinds of search pattern optimal cooperative path problem is established with the aim of maximizing the search performance in the fixed search time, the concrete solution of multiple ship search paths is given by using the improved co-evolutionary algorithm, and the multi-ship cooperative optimal search path under different search styles is obtained by simulation experiment. The results show that the method has the advantages of large searching range and high searching efficiency compared with conventional methods, which is suitable for solving the multi-ship anti- submarine search path planning problem.