SEAPATH, Software Enabled Automation Platform and Artifacts (THerein), aims at developing a “reference design” and “industrial grade” open source real-time platform that can run virtualized automation and protection applications for the power grid industry in and potentially beyond. The LF Energy Technical Advisory Council has recently conducted a review of the project and elected to graduate it from the Incubation phase to Early Adoption. This signifies that SEAPATH is operating as an open-source community and seeing a growing and diverse number of contributors and users of the project.
Over the past three years, SEAPATH has seen a 781% increase in the number of individuals contributing code to the project, which has enabled the project to add new features and functionalities including:
- The ability to host virtual machines that can run real-time applications.
- Hardening of the operating system to ensure security and compliance.
- Implementing a high availability cluster feature for resources like VMs and storage.
- The capability to automatically track and evaluate the impact of modifications on the platform via testing.
- Facilitating consistent and standardized remote deployment of updates.
- Facilitating easy deployment of VMs for users through guidelines and tooling.
- Allowing users to view and modify configuration of VMs and rollback as necessary.
- Ensuring hardware-agnosticism and independence from specific hardware.
- Implementing strong and reliable time synchronization based on Precision Time Protocol.
- Security updates, including achievement of the OpenSSF Silver Best Practices Badge.
- Continuous integration including virtual IEC61850 sender / receiver with latency monitoring
The SEAPATH community now will move to encourage more proofs of concept by encouraging deployment of the tool amongst more power utilities. Additionally, the project intends to enhance testing with industry real use cases linked to the SEAPATH Github to test real-time deployments, cybersecurity, clusters, VMs that includes tools for IEC61850 tests specifically, and more.
Those interested in getting involved with SEAPATH can review and contribute to the code on GitHub, review project documentation, and subscribe to the project mailing list.
