In recent years a noticeable renewed interest in modeling dislocations at the mesoscopic scale has been developed leading to significant advances in the field. This interest has arisen from a desire to link the atomistic and macroscopic length scales. In this context, we have recently developed a 3D-discrete dislocation dynamics model (DDD) based on a nodal discretization of the dislocations. We present here the basis of our DDD model and two examples of studies with single and multiple slip planes. ? 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.