A transient analysis software for high voltage cables has been developed as an aid to partial discharge measurements carried out to assess the insulation condition of installed cables. Knowledge of the transient behavior of cable systems allow to know if a specific measuring PD system is sensitive enough to detect partial discharge pulses that can occur along a high voltage cable. Series impedances of a high voltage cable are analyzed considering its semiconducting layers using Bessel functions. The influence of semiconducting layers is also taken into account to determine the parallel impedance of a high voltage cable. A Gaussian pulse is considered as a PD pulse traveling along the cable and the inverse Laplace transform is used to determine the resulting pulse at the end of a cable length. The results presented in this paper show that attenuation and distortion of PD pulses traveling along any cable system depend largely on the resistivity and the permittivity relativity of semiconducting layers of the high voltage cables.