THE LINUX FOUNDATION PROJECTS

Industrial-Grade Open Source Virtualization for Digital Substations

SEAPATH is a virtualization environment for digital substations. It provides a high-availability, real-time hypervisor designed to host virtualized protection, automation, and control (vPAC) applications in IEC 61850 substations. Developed collaboratively within LF Energy, SEAPATH delivers a hardware-, software-, and vendor-agnostic platform that brings together IT, OT, cybersecurity, and power engineering expertise to enable interoperable, resilient, and standards-compliant substation automation.

By combining mature open source components into a robust, continuously tested platform, SEAPATH provides utilities and vendors with a shared foundation to accelerate deployment of digital substations – improving reliability, reducing integration costs, and advancing the energy transition.

Explore DocumentationMeeting Calendar
SEAPATH Substation Diagram

Real-Time Performance

Optimized for IEC 61850 applications with deterministic latency

High Availability

Clustering, redundancy, and distributed storage for mission-critical operations

Cybersecure and Resilient

Developed with security-by-design principles and 700+ daily CI tests

Infrastructure-as-Code

Automated configuration and remote management

Fully Open Source

Apache 2.0 license for unrestricted adoption and commercialization

Features

SEAPATH integrates mature open source building blocks into an industrial-grade, real-time virtualization stack:

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 Architecture Overview

SEAPATH Architecture Overview

Why SEAPATH?

For Utilities and Grid Operators

  • Virtualized protection, automation, and control (vPAC) application hosting
  • Scalable digital substation automation aligned with IEC 61850
  • Deployment of interoperable, multi-vendor digital substation systems
  • Ability to deploy autonomous and semi-autonomous grid control functions
  • Improved operational resilience with high-availability clustering
  • Improved maintainability and remote management capabilities
  • Reduced hardware footprint and simplified lifecycle management
  • Build a digital supply chain to connect and optimize information and services
  • Streamlined cybersecurity compliance with testing-validated components
  • Lower lifecycle cost via open source and hardware independence

For Substation Equipment Vendors & Integrators

  • Deliver vIEDs on a standardized, high-performance virtualization layer
  • Reduce porting and custom integration costs
  • Integrate with open source IEC 61850 tooling (e.g., CoMPAS)
  • Support modernization and virtualization roadmaps for global utilities

SEAPATH in the Field

Case Studies

Getting Involved

Participation is open and collaborative. Anyone may:

Contact

Have questions or want to get involved?
Reach out to info@lfenergy.org.