Electromagnetomechanical CAD bench-marks and system evaluation

Bench-marks are an important part of the overall CAD evaluation process. Such bench-marks, proposed and agreed on by the specialist community, have proved invaluable as a starting point to both users and vendors, in evaluating: ease of use; documentation; modelling ability; overall problem solving time; accuracy; reliability; compatibility with associated software; adherence to all relevant standards and overall quality of the software product and its maintenance and support. Unfortunately, industrial low-frequency CAD of electromagnetics lags behind, and there is a great deal of room for improvement. The authors summarise what there is available, and propose what might be done to establish a set of bench-marks, which could be believed in and relied upon by the industrial user