Model validation performs a basic level of sanity checking on the data attributes provided in the NMS model. After the model has been loaded each device is validated to determine if it has reasonable data. These checks are performed on a device by device basis without consideration of the context. Therefore model validation will catch things like a device's rating might be outside all reasonable limits (for example, a transformer has a negative rating), but it won't catch that a 1/0 Conductor has been used where you'd expect to see a 336 kCM device.

Validation failures are categorized as: Errors or Warnings. Power flow will not be attempted on islands containing errors; these will be reported as "Model Errors" in the FLM Summary window.

Details about model validation checks can be obtained in two ways.

Not all issues can be caught by sanity checking or are appropriate given the context of the device in the surrounding network. Some errors (for example, inappropriately sized capacitors or incorrect voltage angles on sources) will introduce errors that ultimately cause the Power Flow solution to fail. These types of failures will be reported as "Solution Failed" or "Inconclusive Solution" in the FLM tools.

These types of issues are somewhat harder to debug. To start with the details can be viewed by right clicking on the feeder and selecting "Show Errors and Statistics" and then looking under the "Solution Details" tab. This will give hints as to where the power flow engine is having difficulty converging on a solution.

Another approach it to use Study Mode analysis to try to locate the problem. By incrementally isolating sections of the network it is possible to narrow down the faulted device. Start off by removing everything below the energization sources and verify a solution can be obtained. Afterwards add in chunks of the network until the solution starts erroring again, this will help identify problematic regions and devices.

The Upstream Impedance Trace is an optional tool (which we recommend you configure) allows a user to generate an impedance report for a section of electrical network ad hoc. The report shows the individual device impedances along the selected section of network and helps to identify potential data issues. A user clicks a point on the network where they would like to start the report and the tool then traces upstream to the source finding all impedance contributing devices along the trace path. This tool helps to identify sections of network where impedance may be defaulted or incorrectly attributed leading to incorrect power flow results such as inaccurate FLA predictions.

The Conductor Mismatch Tool can be invoked by an admin type user and runs in the background. It attempts to find sections of network where conductor impedances look incorrect. For example if a circuit backbone was primarily large conductors and in the middle there was a very small conductor (for example, 556ACSR to 2/0 AL), this would most likely be representative of a data error in the attribution of conductor sizing. These potential data issues are placed in a report which can then be reviewed by an admin type user or displayed in the NMS user interface.