The mission of the SEAPATH project is to develop 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 the first place and potentially beyond). This platform is intended to host multi-provider applications.
The project will encompass the following activities:
- Specifying the requirements to be fulfilled by the reference platform
- Specifying the test procedures needed to assess the fulfillment of the requirements
- Building the appropriate system(s) architecture(s) for the software platform and specifying requirements for hardware architecture
- Developing code for the specific functions and services to be delivered by the platform
- Defining and implementing APIs to external applications
- Performing the integration of the software platform
- Testing the fulfillment of the requirements after the implementation, as a proof-of-concept, of a realistic protection and automation system on top of the integrated software platform
- Defining guidelines and best practices to integrate, test (including interoperability tests) deploy, and maintain the applications on such platform
The project will take benefit from standardization activities that define requirement references for the use cases targeted by the virtualization platform. Relevant standards could for instance include IEC 60255, IEC 60870, IEC 61850 and IEC 61869. In the case where the requirements and guidance from the standards are not appropriate or still work in progress,the project may have to take different choices. In such case the project will strive to provide feedback to the relevant standardization activities.
You can start from here
Due to the Energy Transition the use of power transmission and distribution grids is changing. The control architecture of power grids needs to be swiftly adapted to take account of infeed at lower grid levels, higher dynamics in flow patterns and more distributed controls (both internal controls and grid flexibility services from third parties).
In this context TSOs and DSOs require a new generation of Digital Substation Automation Systems (DSAS) providing more dynamic protection settings and adaptive automation functions. Moreover, data management gets significant, both for the remote administration of deployed automation and protection functions, as well as for the communication with central or local systems and processes. Thus the design of the new DSAS will have to allow for a drastically higher level of modularity, interoperability and scalability compared to the previous generations.
Virtualization and open source collaborations will be key features in order to fulfill the needs above. They are expected to boost substantially (see motivations in the initial roadmap document):
- time and cost-efficiency,
- scalability and flexibility,
- innovation,
- vendor-agnostic implementations and convergence of utility practices.
You can connect with the community in a variety of ways...
Interested in contributing? Please read carefully the CONTRIBUTING guidelines.
SEAPATH is a project hosted by the LF Energy Foundation. This project's techincal charter is located in https://github.com/lf-energy/foundation/blob/main/project_charters/seapath_charter.pdf and has established it's own processes for managing day-to-day processes in the project at Project Governance
