Abstract: The coal mine environment is complex and changing, radio channel is easily affected by non-line of sight, multipath fading, and human factors, so location error of RSSI-based fingerprint positioning technology is large; we proposed a multidimensional scaling positioning algorithm based on RSSI. In this paper, we construct the dissimilarity matrix according to the ranging of coal mine signal propagation model; MDS method is used to calculate the relative coordinates of the nodes. According to the planar four parameters model, we can calculate real coordinates of the mobile nodes; the particle swarm optimization is used to optimize the position coordinates of the nodes. This method can realize the moving target location in the coal mines in real time. Experiments show that, after optimization, the positioning accuracy of node is improved obviously. It meets the needs of low cost in the positioning system.