Abstract: The control of unmanned marine vehicle（UMV） cluster for treatment of oil spill at sea is studied. The lag of task allocation, low convergence speed and possibility to be trapped in local optimal solution are found quit often in the process of formation control. A new control design is proposed where, tour route planning, the upper layer process, and task allocation, the lower layer process, are tightly combined. The new design uses Hungarian algorithm to build the multi-UMV cost matrix and allocate “tentative tasks” to individual UMVs in the oil containment action. The ant colony optimization is used to solve the problem of tour route planning and generate the shortest closed loop of touring for the UMV cluster. Simulation is performed, which shows that the travel distance reduction of 15.13% and average computing time reduction of 46.57% are achieved with the new design.