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This paper proposed an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to solve the three-dimensional problem of path planning for the fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in the complex environment. The improved PSO algorithm (called DCA ∗ PSO) based dynamic divide-and-conquer (DC) strategy and modified A ∗ algorithm is designed to reach higher precision for the optimal flight path. In the proposed method, the entire path is divided into multiple segments, and these segments are evolved in parallel by using DC strategy, which can convert the complex high-dimensional problem into several parallel low-dimensional problems. In addition, A ∗ algorithm is adopted to generated an optimal path from the particle swarm, which can avoid premature convergence and enhance global search ability. When DCA ∗ PSO is used to solve the large-scale path planning problem, an adaptive dynamic strategy of the segment selection is further developed to complete an effective variable grouping according to the cost. To verify the optimization performance of DCA ∗ PSO algorithm, the real terrain data is utilized to test the performance for the route planning. The experiment results show that the proposed DCA ∗ PSO algorithm can effectively obtain better optimization results in solving the path planning problem of UAV, and it takes on better optimization ability and stability. In addition, DCA ∗ PSO algorithm is proved to search a feasible route in the complex environment with a large number of the waypoints by the experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]