Abstract：Under the background of limited resources and time，equipment maintenance is considered as an

effective way to maintain the stable operation of the system. In order to allocate maintenance resources efficiently，

the most critical equipment in the system should be identified first namely those that will cause significant

consequences if they fail. Firstly，a new multicriteria decision-making（MCDM）scheme was proposed to identify the critical lines in the distribution network. Different from the previous analytic based hierarchy process，the best-worst method（BWM）was adopted to obtain the weight of the system reliability index according to the knowledge and judgment of experts. In addition，the fuzzy theory was introduced into the traditional best-worst method to overcome the general uncertainty in expert judgment and decision making. Finally，the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution technology was used to prioritize the maintenance of IEEE14 distribution network lines. The proposed method can determine the priority of system maintenance more quickly and accurately.

      Key words：multicriteria decision-making（MCDM）；best-worst method（BWM）；distribution network

maintenance；critical lines