A Software Environment for Developing Object-Oriented Applications in Distribution Management Systems

Thanks to the increasing capability of computing systems, the development of Distribution Management Systems for electrical distribution systems can be approached from the perspective of flexibility, expansibility and maintainability. For this purpose, new methods have been recently proposed, in which the modeling of the distribution systems as well as algorithms and computational methods have been developed with an object-oriented (OO) approach. In this paper an extensible software environment for the development and the implementation of OO methods, aimed at distribution network applications, is presented. It is an open platform, based on timed Petri nets and on a discrete event scheduler, useful to simulate custom applications with specifically developed libraries and code. A significant example on distribution system state estimation is presented, which highlights the features of the environment.