Abstract: Flight formation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) needs to be reconfigured when the battle environment is modified. The collision problem poses a great threat to the formation reconfiguration which thus is a key factor to consider. Based on the analysis of the collision problem during reconfiguration, distributed model predictive control (DMPC) is put forward to transform the reconfiguration problem into a series of online optimizations. After the setup of the cost function with collision restriction taken intoconsideration, a modified differential evolution (DE) algorithm is proposed to cope with the complex cost function. Furthermore, the convergence of this algorithm is validated. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can realize formation reconfiguration without collision while the optimization result and cost are superior to standard DE algorithms.