A distributed optimization method based on insect intelligence is developed to address the problem of hydraulic imbalance and flow supply and demand imbalance in the central heating system pipe network. The first goal of the optimization is to minimize the system's energy consumption, which is broken down into two sub-problems: optimizing the opening degree of the pipe network's regulating valve and optimizing the operation of the parallel pumps in the heat exchange station. Secondly, the model of the regulating valve and the hydraulic model of the pipe network are established. On this basis, the opening of the regulating valve is optimized, so as to calculate the minimum water pressure difference between the supply and return of the system. Then, the optimized operation of the parallel pumps is completed based on the improved alternating direction method of multipliers. After that, an example of central heating system is given to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm. Results show that compared with the traditional centralized solution algorithm, this algorithm is not limited by the scale of the hydraulic pipe network, and is beneficial to realize plug and play in engineering. Compared with other distributed algorithms, this algorithm can not only solve the problem quickly, but also obtain a better pipe network operation strategy, and has a significant energy saving effect.