Nowadays, smart grids are becoming a topic of global interest, with many engineers and academics across the world addressing it as the enabling factor for the evolution of our society into a “smart society”. Smart grids are still at their infancy, however their theoretical background and the challenges they must withstand are known to engineers. A crucial problem is the monitoring and control of the smart grid. All the proposed solutions need to know the system information and behavior, which tends to exhibit high diversity. To solve this problem, as well as provide tools for apparatus testing, derive design models etc., a way to aid system analysis is via the employment of power systems simulator. Many simulator designs have been developed in the past, but our thesis target is the real-time one. In this thesis, an adaptive real-time power systems simulator architecture is presented and analyzed. Firstly, the smart grid concept is introduced and the theoretical basis of the power systems simulator followed in this approach is shown analytically. Secondly, the target architecture is divided into 2 separate simpler tasks, the first being closer to the user of the simulator platform and the second dedicated to the efficient implementation of the simulator in hardware (i.e. onto Field Programmable Logic Arrays-FPGAs). Each task is thoroughly presented, along with the associated algorithms used to simplify the system analysis and simulation, reducing the time and effort that the user needs to create many different simulator designs. Lastly, the algorithms’ validity is verified by applying appropriate tests, whose results are also presented.