Water loss in water distribution systems is one of the major problems faced by water utilities. The components of water losses should be accurately assessed and their priority should be determined. Generally, water balance analysis is used to quantify different components of water losses and identify the main contributor to high leakage rates. The leak flow rate is assumed to be static within a given calculation period during the calculation of real losses. Errors will inevitably arise during this process. This is mainly due to our limited understanding of a leak's growth process. To overcome this problem, the current work proposes the use of growth functions to represent a leak's growth process and establish a functional relationship between the leak flow rate and the leak duration. A leakage development model is adopted to simulate a leak's growth process and optimize the parameters of growth functions. The results show that the Richards function performs better than other growth functions and its mean absolute percentage error is 15.33%. Furthermore, the growth function could be used to calculate real losses and has the prospect of evaluating the effects of leakage detection.

配水系统中的失水是自来水公司面临的主要问题之一。应准确评估水损失的组成部分，并确定其优先级。通常，水平衡分析用于量化水损失的不同组成部分，并确定导致高泄漏率的主要因素。在计算实际损失期间，假定泄漏流量在给定计算周期内是静态的。在这个过程中难免会出现错误。这主要是由于我们对泄漏的增长过程了解有限。为了克服这个问题，目前的工作提出使用增长函数来表示泄漏的增长过程并建立泄漏流量和泄漏持续时间之间的函数关系。采用泄漏发展模型来模拟泄漏的增长过程，优化增长函数的参数。结果表明，Richards 函数的性能优于其他增长函数，其平均绝对百分比误差为 15.33%。此外，增长函数可用于计算实际损失，并具有评估泄漏检测效果的前景。