Urban water supply is a fundamental part of every city’s construction, and one of the pressing issues in water distribution networks(WDNs) is leak location. Leak location is important for reducing water supply losses and achieving sustainable water supply. The main means of leakage detection is the placement of pressure sensors in the network, and the location of possible leaks is analyzed through pressure changes. The problem of placing pressure sensors can be described as a constrained nonlinear integer programming problem, which is often computationally overloaded in real pipe networks due to their large size and high complexity using traditional optimization methods. So using meta-heuristic algorithms to solve this problem is a suitable approach. In this paper, the recently proposed gaining-sharing-knowledge-based (GSK) algorithm is used to solve the problem of optimizing the placement of pressure sensors with the aim of improving the success rate of leak location in pipe networks.