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OpenDSS Designer

OpenDSS Designer is a free, open-source graphical user interface (GUI) for OpenDSS, EPRI's distribution system simulator. Draw a substation-style one-line diagram in your browser — the drawing is the circuit model — then run a power flow and see bus voltages, element loading, and violations directly on the diagram.

OpenDSS Designer: a solved one-line diagram with voltage and loading overlays

Why

OpenDSS is a superb solver with a famously austere front end. If you have ever wished you could draw a feeder instead of scripting it — or hand OpenDSS to a colleague who doesn't want to learn the DSS command language — this tool is for you. It is built on OpenDSSDirect.py, so every solve is the real OpenDSS engine, and everything you draw exports to a plain .dss file you can run anywhere.

Quick start

Requires Python 3.10+.

pip install opendss-designer
opendss-designer          # starts a local server and opens your browser

Everything runs locally on your machine — nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Head to Getting started for a walkthrough, or Components for the full element reference.

Highlights

  • Draw the circuit: click-and-place sources, busbars, transformers, breakers, loads, capacitors, generators, PV systems, and storage; drag between terminals to wire
  • Solve on the diagram: snapshot power flow with per-bus voltage (pu), loading pie charts, power flows, color-coded violations, fault currents, and losses — or auto-solve on every edit
  • Time-series simulation: daily or yearly runs with load, solar, and storage-dispatch shapes; scrub or play through the results right on the diagram — see Time-series analysis
  • Real-world data: import NREL/NLR building load profiles by climate zone and building type, and NSRDB solar irradiance by location — see Shapes & profiles
  • Import existing models: open your current .dss files (with redirects) and get an automatically laid-out diagram
  • Spreadsheet view: bulk-edit every element in an Excel-style table with fill-down
  • Graphs: voltage profiles along the feeder, and any recorded quantity over simulation time, in the classic OpenDSS plot style
  • Export: a runnable .dss script, byte-for-byte the same commands the built-in solver uses

Open source

MIT-licensed, developed on GitHub — issues and pull requests welcome. See Development to hack on it.