Validation of Numerical codes for the Analysis of plasma discharges

Electromagnetic aspects in the design of ITER-like reactors call for an exrensive use of complex and advanced numerical codes. For this reason a strong attention has been paid within the NET-Team to the code development. In particular, through a cooperation with some Italian universities, during the last years a number of numerical procedures were developed and integrated. In order to assess the code reliability and to gain confidence on their predictions for next generation ITER-like reactors, the validation of the codes against experiments has to be considered as a strict requirement. Aim of this paper is to give a comprehensive presentation of this problem in the light of the results of a campaign of validation runs. The main outcone of this work is that the computational procedures, which have been developed for the NET project and then extensively used also for ITER studies, can be considered as experimentally validated in a sufficiently wide range of cases of interest. In particular, computed values are compared with experimental measurements made during some typical ASDEX-Upgrade discharges. From the electromagnetic point of view, many features of this machine are common to the ITER concept, so that the results of the validation can reasonably be extended to the ITER case.