Rational planning of the network reconfiguration procedure is of great importance for restoring a power system with a complete blackout.The network characteristics of a power system and the impact caused by the failure of reconnecting a transmission line are addressed first，and three indices for evaluating the importance of each line are presented，including the bridging power of the line，the line connectivity，and the power-bearing degree of the line.A new method is next presented to comprehensively evaluate the importance of each line.Then，the interpretative structural modeling（ISM）is employed to direct the network reconfiguration after a complete blackout.With the quick and secure restoration of each generating unit as the premise，the restoration benefit is defined and its maximization employed as the objective to select the generating unit to be restored，with the restored generation capacity and the importance of each relevant line comprehensively considered.By applying the developed optimization model，the restoration sequence of the generating units and their restoration paths can be optimized simultaneously.Finally，a New England10-unit39-bus power system is employed to demonstrate the essential characteristics of the method developed.