This paper presents a model-free methodology for the placement of pressure sensors in
water distribution networks (WDNs) with the aim of performing leak detection/localization
tasks. The approach is based on a custom genetic algorithm (GA) optimization scheme,
which considers a population whose individuals are binary vectors encoding the network
nodes with/without sensors. The optimization process pursues the minimization of a distance-
based metric, computed considering the pipe distance from the possible sensors to the …