本研究的目的是调查骨骼化对供水系统建模精度的影响。研究中调查的四个骨骼化水平包括:1）主要基于一组规定管道尺寸的规则的总体水平表示；2） 更详细的骨架化水平，使用工程判断，通过包含更多的回路来扩展第一级；3） 更详细的骨骼化程度；4）基本上包括所有管道。在整个分析过程中，通过与完整系统表示相比的结果差异来衡量模型的准确性，随着包含更多管道而增加。 然而，第一级和第二级骨骼化之间的准确性有了相当大的提高。第二个重要结论是，骨骼化的影响取决于正在进行的分析类型。总的来说，与更标准的水力分析相比，依赖于流径和行程时间的精确表示的水质分析对骨架化程度更为敏感。此外，在压力更大的水力条件下，骨骼化引入的误差更为严重。

The goal of this study was to investigate the impacts of skeletonization on the accuracy of modeling of a water distribution system. The four levels of skeletonization investigated in the study included: 1) a gross level representation based primarily on a set of rules specifying pipe sizes to include; 2) a slightly more detailed level of skeletonization using engineering judgment to expand the first level by inclusion of a few more loops; 3) a significantly more detailed level of skeletonization; and 4) inclusion of essentially all pipes. Throughout the analyses performed, the accuracy of the models, as measured by the difference in results as compared to the full system representation, increased with inclusion of more pipes. There was, however, a fairly substantial increase in accuracy between the first and second levels of skeletonization. A second important conclusion is that the impacts of skeletonization depend upon the type of analysis being performed. In general, water quality analyses dependent upon accurate representations of flow paths and travel times are more sensitive to level of skeletonization than are more standard hydraulic analyses. Additionally, the errors introduced by skeletonization are more acute under more stressful hydraulic conditions.