During the construction of mass concrete structures, the embedded water pipe cooling system is regarded as a standard tool to control temperature. Prediction of thermal field in the structures plays an essential role in the design of cooling systems. In this study, the localized radial basis function collocation method is presented to simulate the thermal field in concrete structures with the water pipe cooling system. In the proposed scheme, the multiquadric radial basis function is used for the spatial discretization where a novel technique is applied for the determination of shape parameters. Because of the localized strategy, the sparse system can be formed to save storage and reduce computational cost. Five examples including a problem with five water cooling pipes and a three-dimensional problem with one cooling pipe are experimented. From the numerical results, it is evidently that the present method is feasible and has attractive advantages in the simulation of thermal fields in practical concrete structures with cooling systems. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.