Network maintenance strategy selection is a multi-objective decision making topic. It mostly depends on the uncertainty and fuzziness of decision makers and conditions. In this paper, based on analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), TOPSIS partial order method is proposed to choose the optimal maintenance strategy. This method uses AHP to determine the weights of evaluation indexes. The optimal maintenance strategy choice is given as an example to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. © 2016, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.