Some of my work needs realistic electricity network data - so I wrote a generator. It has a set of assets it knows about - Substations, Lines, Poles, Switches, Transformers and so on - and each one knows how to build itself on a map … and to build itself recursively …
Essentially I place a Substation; and in doing so, the Substation decides to create one or more Lines (heading out on orthogonal directions); the Lines always create a Pole, and may choose to create more Lines, or a Transformer, or a Switch; these in turn will create other assets.
The network scales nicely - I regularly build networks with 100k assets in a few seconds - and where Ortho really shines is that it exports the data out in a multitude of formats : CSVs for analysis, dot files for topology, and then files that can be loaded into SQL or Graph databases.