SUMMARYIn the period of transmission maintenance, the phenomenon of power interruption or even progressing to cascading failure occurs commonly just originating from one or some elements out of service. Therefore, reasonable transmission maintenance scheduling is important to ensure the safe and stable operation of power supply system. In this paper, a transmission maintenance scheduling strategy considering potential fault risk balance is proposed. Combined with the theory of value at risk and the character of potential fault, the potential fault risk index is defined to represent the possibility and risk level of the whole system power failure under the condition of the certain element failing. Meanwhile, compared with traditional transmission maintenance scheduling model, the balance index and normalized weight factor shown as the system's risk difference of each maintenance period is considered into the objective function to achieve risk sharing and real operation reliability in the whole schedule. In addition, the random potential fault simulation is applied to solve calculation problem when making the schedule. Numerical results of IEEE-118 bus system show the validity of the methodology proposed.