Regional-scale risk assessment of forest fires induced by distribution lines via a hybrid approach

Forest fire accidents caused by distribution line faults occur frequently, resulting in heavy impacts on people’s safety and social and economic development. Currently, there are few risk assessments for forest fires induced by overhead distribution lines, and existing assessment methods may have difficulties in data acquisition. On this basis, a novel assessment framework based on an analytic hierarchy process, a Bayesian network and a Fussel-Vesely importance metric is proposed in this paper. The framework combines field research and historical operation and maintenance data to assess the regional-scale risk of forest fires induced by overhead distribution lines to derive the probability of forest fires and to identify high-risk lines and key hazard events in the assessment region. Finally, taking the southern Anhui region as an example, the annual fire probability of forest fires induced by overhead distribution lines in the southern Anhui region is 5.88%, and rectification measures are proposed. This study provides management with a complete assessment framework that optimizes the difficulty of data collection and allows for additional targeted corrective measures to be proposed for the entire region and route on the basis of the assessment results.