Preface

Users of Overhead Line Design Software are faced with many different choices of vendors and options in their software to help achieve code compliance and meet utility standards. Users desire to know if their choice of software will ensure they meet code and standard compliance. Suppliers of these software wish to assure their customers that this would be true. Until now there has been no framework for users or vendors to question or communicate in a complete way.

This document provides a framework that attempts to seriously critique vendor software solutions in many different ways, plus provide a mechanism that permits several software and real-world validation tests to be compared side by side. By doing so it becomes transparent to users exactly what a software will do and what it will not; allowing users to make informed choices about how/if the software fits within their overall Line Design Process. Lack of software functionality, complicated steps or poor performance in some tests will become more visible to both users and vendors in this framework; allowing vendors to focus development in certain areas and permitting users to make adjustments to their process in the meantime. A responsible vendor should willingly participate in this framework exercise in order to support the end user's due diligence requirement. Although the full set of tests listed in this document is recommended, vendors may limit some tests to maximize the effort/benefit of this exercise.

Scope

The focus of this document is all about overhead power, joint-use and communication lines; typically run on single pole structures of various material types (wood, concrete, steel, composite...) The initial geographic scope will be for code compliancy in North America. It is permissible if a software vendor only wishes to address only a subset of the proposed test cases. 

Where applicable, deterministic and static loads are the major loads and stability (buckling) are concerns. Specifically, reliability-based loading, broken wire tests and dynamic responses are not currently within the scope of this work.

Single and multi-pole structural analysis will include Linear and Nonlinear methodologies.

Licensing

Use of this document is covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. It permits usage and modification for commercial and non-commercial purposes. While Sonideft would like to encourage collaboration with future users and competitors to improve and update this document, this may or may not occur. For this reason the copyright should remain with Sonideft (the author) until the potential collaboration group becomes significant and making this document "Public Domain" would be in everyone's best interests.

Results Review

Each software vendor will need to decide the extent that they evaluate all possible test cases suggested in this document. It is expected that the vendor will want to review the results of each test case and compare it to others they trust. They can summarize or detail these comparisons publicly or to certain entities/customers to the extent they wish. The choice of what results they are comparing against to claim their accuracy or adherence against is their decision to make. When shared with others, they should be prepared to defend their reference test case results.  

Where available, results from real-world tests could be included in the results comparison.

A collaboration group is encouraged to discuss and agree upon specific reference test case results and potential changes to this document. Open and fair assessments is the goal in support of strong engineering due diligence; within the scope of this document.