The Jiziwan region, situated in the Yellow River basin, serves as an energy resource-rich region and an ecological barrier in China. It is also a convergence zone for multiple national major projects. However, water scarcity remains the primary constraint for ecological conservation and high-quality development in the region. Based on an optimal water resource allocation scheme for water-receiving areas of the Western Route of the South-to-North Water Transfer Project, accelerating the construction of the overall water network structure in the Jiziwan region is critical to addressing the bottleneck related to water resources. This study reviews the current status of water diversion and transfer projects in the Jiziwan region, and identifies the interconnections and competitive-complementary effects among key projects. It also analyzes decentralized and centralized gravity-fed water supply schemes, and proposes an integrated centralized‒decentralized optimization strategy for the regional water network. Proposal for optimizing the integrated water network configuration in the Jiziwan region through utilizing allocated water resources from the Western Route of the South-North Water Transfer Project is put forward. The resulting framework establishes a three-tier water network system in the Jiziwan region: The Jiudianxia‒Wuding River centralized water supply project and the mainstem of the Yellow River form the "backbone"; the Guxian water supply, Heishanxia water supply, and other Yellow River diversion projects act as "branches"; and high-standard silt-trapping dams (with anti-breaching capacity, water storage, and sediment retention functions) along with small-to-medium reservoirs serve as "nodes". This layout can fully leverage existing and under-construction water supply projects across provinces in the Jiziwan region, ensures efficient gravity-fed operation, and offers advantages such as strong regulation capacity, high water source reliability, and low engineering costs, which provides a valuable reference for advancing high-quality water network construction in the Jiziwan region.