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SEAPATH is a high availability real-time hypervisor for hosting digital substation virtualized protection and control applications (vPAC).

SEAPATH is an open source software hypervisor designed for IEC 61850 Digital Substation Automation Systems. It has been designed and built as an industrial-grade solution dedicated to the critical context of digital stations, meeting the challenges of interoperability, real-time performance, high availability, standards compliance and cybersecurity constraints. SEAPATH hosts and runs vPAC (Virtualized Protection, Automation and Control) applications for the power grid industry (and potentially beyond).

SEAPATH is a best-of-breed technology that combines mature, existing open source components to create a robust, hardware- and software-agnostic solution that meets high performance expectations (real-time) of its use cases. The project has been developed according to cybersecurity best practices, and utilizes state-of-the-art continuous integration with over 700 daily tests to ensure, for example, that a virtual intelligence electronic device (vIED) hosted/managed by SEAPATH meets the desired criteria in terms of latency and robustness.

SEAPATH is a collaborative project at the convergence of IT/OT, bringing together a diverse community of experts spanning Linux, IT, DevOps, cybersecurity, and electrical engineering.

SEAPATH is an acronym for Software Enabled Automation Platform and Artifacts (Therein). It is part of the LF Energy Digital Substations Special Interest Group.

Project Features

SEAPATH currently or will include the following features:

  • Ecosystem agnostic, easily used and extended by third parties
    • Hardware agnostic: can be installed on different types of servers and architectures (x86, ARM, etc.)
    • Vendor agnostic: a heterogeneous variety of virtual machines can be deployed and managed on the platform.
    • Open source: released under a permissive open source license (Apache 2.0), enabling effortless adoption, customization, integration into existing projects, and commercialization opportunities for users.
    • On-going integration with other LF Energy digital substation projects, such as CoMPAS and FledgePOWER
  • High performance, ready for IEC 61850 applications
    • Real-time capabilities: can host applications with high performance needs.
    • Time synchronization: natively support NTP and PTP (IEEE 1588) synchronizations.
  • Resilience, robust for mission-critical systems
    • High availability and clustering: offers cluster functionalities to guarantee availability in case of hardware or software failures.
    • Distributed storage: data and disk images of the virtual machines are replicated and synchronized to guarantee its integrity and availability on the cluster.
  • Infrastructure as code, allowing automated and remote system management
    • Configuration: initial configuration is done using scripted tasks, ensuring exact replication of desired operations and avoiding manual errors.
    • Administration: can be easily managed from a remote machine connected to the network as well as by an administrator on site.
  • Intensive testing, guaranteeing capabilities and avoiding regression
  • Virtualization, to run virtual machines hosting Operational Technology (OT) functions
    • Open source type 1 hypervisor builtin linux kernel – KVM
    • Virtualization API used to manage hypervisor – libvirt
    • Easily manage VM with custom tool – vm_manager

SEAPATH in Digital Substations

SEAPATH is designed to host various types of vIEDs. It meets the necessary criteria to enable these vIEDs to communicate using the IEC 61850 protocols.

Contributing Organizations

Case Studies

Videos

Streamlining SEAPATH Deployment and Management in Electrical Substations - Matias Vara, Red Hat & Erwann Roussy, Savoir-faire Linux

SEAPATH is an open reference architecture designed to run virtualized
Protection, Automation, and Control (vPAC) workloads in substations
using Linux, KVM/QEMU, and Ceph. It ensures real-time performance and
high availability across a fault-tolerant three-host cluster. This
presentation is divided into two parts.

The first part introduces SEAPATH and presents a new image-based
deployment workflow using bootc. Previously, SEAPATH installation was
error-prone, relying on manual ISO setup and complex Ansible
playbooks. Any base image change required a full reinstall, and
rollbacks were nearly impossible. We replaced this process with a
single bootable OCI image that includes all necessary
components—real-time kernel, QEMU, Ceph. With bootc install, updates
and rollbacks become atomic (bootc upgrade / bootc rollback). It
drastically reduces the usage of Ansible for hypervisor
configuration.This greatly reduces errors, ensures reproducibility,
and simplifies deployment.

The second part focuses on SEAPATH’s management component, and details
how clusters are configured and operated after the initial deployment.
It will introduce SEAPATH’s Infrastructure as Code philosophy,
showcasing its benefits in terms of reproducibility, readability, and
version control. SEAPATH uses declarative configuration to describe
the desired system state, enabling automated, consistent deployments
across digital substations. Some advanced SEAPATH usage and
configuration will be presented. 25:33

Streamlining SEAPATH Deployment and Management in Electrical Substations - Matias Vara, Red Hat & Erwann Roussy, Savoir-faire Linux

SEAPATH is an open reference architecture designed to run virtualized
Protection, Automation, and Control (vPAC) workloads in substations
using Linux, KVM/QEMU, and Ceph. It ensures real-time performance and
high availability across a fault-tolerant three-host cluster. This
presentation is divided into two parts.

The first part introduces SEAPATH and presents a new image-based
deployment workflow using bootc. Previously, SEAPATH installation was
error-prone, relying on manual ISO setup and complex Ansible
playbooks. Any base image change required a full reinstall, and
rollbacks were nearly impossible. We replaced this process with a
single bootable OCI image that includes all necessary
components—real-time kernel, QEMU, Ceph. With bootc install, updates
and rollbacks become atomic (bootc upgrade / bootc rollback). It
drastically reduces the usage of Ansible for hypervisor
configuration.This greatly reduces errors, ensures reproducibility,
and simplifies deployment.

The second part focuses on SEAPATH’s management component, and details
how clusters are configured and operated after the initial deployment.
It will introduce SEAPATH’s Infrastructure as Code philosophy,
showcasing its benefits in terms of reproducibility, readability, and
version control. SEAPATH uses declarative configuration to describe
the desired system state, enabling automated, consistent deployments
across digital substations. Some advanced SEAPATH usage and
configuration will be presented.

YouTube Video UExLeUZmMUo5WGtwdmd5LXlza0tDMGNKU1VGd1dqQWRTZi5DNzE1RjZEMUZCMjA0RDBB

Streamlining SEAPATH Deployment and Management in Electrical Substati... Matias Vara & Erwann Roussy

September 22, 2025 2:40 pm

LF Energy SEAPATH: Build the Debian ISO and server deployment

July 21, 2025 1:27 pm

Recent SEAPATH News

Upcoming Meetings

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Project Special Interest Group: Digital Substations

Project Lifecycle Stage: Early Adoption