Abstract: In order to improve the localization accuracy of the distributed passive location system in the ocean acoustic field.A sensor deployment method is proposed based on adaptive genetic algorithm in this paper.Firstly,the CRLB (Cramer Rao Lower Bound) of location error is deduced based on the TOA (Time of Arrival) localization algorithmin the uniform field and the ocean acoustic field.Then the ocean acoustic field is modeled by BELLHOP model,the transfer function between the arbitrary target and the received signal of any sensor can be attained via this model,meanwhile the concept of the equivalent sound speed is given.When the target is uniform probability distribution in the ocean acoustic field,the adaptive genetic algorithm is adopted to obtain the optimal sensor configuration by minimizing the average CRLB.Simulation results show that the optimal sensor configuration method can effectively reduce the localization error,besides the non-linear decreasing trend of localization error with the increase of number of sensors is given,which provides theoretical guidance for engineering applications.