Journal of Electrical and Control Engineering JECE JECE Vol. 3 No. 5, 2013 PP. 1-12 www.joece.org/ © American V-King Scientific Publishing 1 Electrical Network’s Modeling & Simulation Tools: The State of the Art. (Case Study of NMSS platform). TAMALI Mohammed *1 , ALLALI Malika 2 , BOUZIDI Boumediene 3 , & TOUMI Toufik 4 ENERGARID Lab./Bechar University, URER/MS Adrar, Algeria, SONELGAZ Bechar, Algeria Po Box 417, Kenadsa St., Bechar, Algeria *1 mtamali@gmail.com; 2 malikaa450@gmail.com; 3 boudi08@yahoo.fr; 4 toufiktoumi@yahoo.fr Abstract: Scientific Software are classified into three categories, business-specific tools designed by company itself and for its proper needs and uses, industrial products planned and designed for general/commercial uses and finally those institutional designed by academic institutions depending on research need of their laboratories. For the first category, platform should meet purely localized and specific tasks of company. Generally used by company itself and named proprietary solution. Second category, tools are planned and manufactured to meet a lot of tasks. These platforms are a licensed solution. Third case is an institutional category where specific codes are written first to meet a specific need in a very specialized problem and then supercharged with additional modules in next versions and updates until a complete software would be born. These are called institution-made solution. Our paper discusses in a general overview about structural and functional characteristics of commonly used software for modelling & simulation of electrical networks. Solutions from the three categories are studied and their main features are described and compared according to criteria of performance evaluation. We introduce later, our NMSS solution (Network Modelling & Simulation System). The modules and their functionalities are exposed to highlight similarities and disparities with other solutions. Keywords: Modelling; Simulation; Numerical Library; GUI Software Component; Electrical Network I. INTRODUCTION The proposal of a specialized product may, in most occasions, be more general and meets to a part of the customer's request. Therefore, the client uses must comply with the conditionings of the platform. In case of an academic solution, it should be noted that the need for a development team is much needed. Major obstacle to initiate research, since no support and stimulation are observed unless this represents a major topic of tasks to be performed by research Laboratory. Many software products for modelling and simulating electrical networks already exist. Products efficiency, used to design an eventual electrical network is significantly dependent on modules set to predict the behavior of studied system under normal or abnormal operating. Manual evaluation is possible for small electrical systems but is expensive in engineering time. In addition, the manual computation methods are not obvious for safety reasons and under cases where the all design is much more expensive and requires more efforts. The consequences of a faulty design of electrical network model can induce: • Danger threatening human lives if adopted. • Increase of total costs of design and its implementation. • Poor Reliability/robustness of outcomes • High costs for repair operations and maintainability. • Causing damage to the network (incorrect decision due to misalignment of the load level with respect to supply request). For designing reliable electrical networks, engineer needs specialized potential human resources and appropriate set of tools. Modern numerical methods provide a fast and accurate calculation of electrical system behaviours and network topologies, once data and parameters were given to platform running required software. Study of electrical network can be quite large and it is very desirable that the engineer has a reliable software tool that uses GUI to acquire data. In the same way, engineer must have access to calculation results in a clear, and unambiguous report. In this paper, we examine some-well known platforms software issued from academic and/or commercial category and designed by professionals of electrical engineering field and their development team. These teams have acquired practice over the time. Software products are presented in what follows without any classification or preference ordering but just an enumeration as an example. Notifications of characteristics are even reported. NMSS, a solution we developed is exposed and compared according to the same criteria. II. EVALUATION CRITERIA MODEL Software tools studied are technically compared under the following criteria and recommendations: - The Graphical User Interface, GUI - Accessibility to visual components - Modularity of all platform