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.

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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:

  • 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

  • Real-time capabilities: can host applications with high performance needs.
  • Time synchronization: natively support NTP and PTP (IEEE 1588) synchronizations.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.