SEAPATH

The SEAPATH community gathered to define the next phase of the project’s roadmap and bring together utilities, vendors, IT companies, and contributors from across the ecosystem.

Participants discussed how SEAPATH supports virtualization for protection, automation, and control applications, helps reduce vendor lock-in, and enables greater flexibility through open standards and software-based approaches for digital substations.

The workshop focused on collaboration, knowledge sharing, and roadmap development, resulting in 35 new actions contributed by the community. Participants also discussed IT/OT convergence, virtualization, interoperability, and the role of open source in modernizing critical energy infrastructure.

Learn more about SEAPATH and the LF Energy ecosystem:
https://lfenergy.org/projects/seapath/

This video provides an overview of the revised LF Energy SEAPATH wiki.

As the energy sector embraces digitalization and decarbonization, utilities are looking for open, interoperable, and reliable solutions.

SEAPATH, an open source project hosted by LF Energy, enables real-time virtualization of protection, automation, control systems and vIED, bridging the gap between IT and OT while ensuring resilience and performance of the grid.

This session is presented by Erwann Roussy, Software Engineer at Savoir-faire Linux and one of the SEAPATH project maintainers.

What You Will Learn
-The vision and architecture behind SEAPATH and its role in IEC 61850 digital substations
-How SEAPATH enables virtualized protection and control (vPAC) with deterministic performance and high availability
-The latest features and ecosystem updates
-How to get started and contribute to the project

End-to-End Substation Digitalisation with QMU 800 & CMPC 800 - Ebrahim Balouji, EcoPhi AB

EcoPhi AB shows how a pair of software-defined edge devices—the QMU 800 AI-driven merging unit and the CMPC 800 cyber-secure substation computer—can virtualise every critical protection, measurement and control function in a medium-voltage substation. Leveraging LF Energy’s Seapatch deterministic edge stack, the QMU 800 streams time-aligned sampled values, GOOSE and PTP over IEC 61869-9, while the CMPC 800 hosts containerised apps for differential & distance protection, PQ metering, PMU, partial-discharge analytics, AMI and fault recording. Modular micro-services allow hot-swapping algorithms, enabling rapid deployment of new use-cases such as grid-forming inverter control and adaptive protection. Benchmark projects in Sweden and Germany cut hardware count by 70 %, shortened commissioning by 60 % and reduced lifecycle costs by 45 % versus IED-centric schemes—without sacrificing IEC 61850 interoperability or NERC-CIP compliance.

A Case Study on Testing LFE Seapath at National Grid Electricity Transmission - Thomas Charton, National Grid Electricity Transmission

This presentation will aim to give a Case Study on a Proof of Concept between GE Vernova and National Grid Electricity Transmission using LFE SEAPATH in order to host and give the required real time performance for Virtualised Protection and Control. The presentation will take the audience through how the project was planned, and it will explain the research that supported the different design decisions that were taken, including how the processing of network packets was accelerated, and how the high priority processes of Sampled Value Processing and Protection Runtime were isolated from interruptions. Results from the project testing will be shared, not just in terms of round-trip times but also with respect to scalability and high availability testing. Finally, the presentation will conclude with what next to expect from developments in this area, including the cybersecurity features now being added to this setup.

What Do Virtualization and SEAPATH Really Change for RTE ? - Bastien Desbos, RTE

Virtualization is no longer a concept—it's a reality in RTE’s substations, powered by our next-generation PACS (Protection, Automation, and Control System) : R#SPACE.

In this talk, we’ll show how we deploy real-time applications applications on SEAPATH, how clustering enhances system resiliency, and what this means for the future of control systems in the energy sector. By sharing our experience, we’ll highlight how virtualization is not just a technical upgrade—but a foundational shift in how we design, manage, and scale critical infrastructure.

SEAPATH: What's New - Recent Improvements and Future Developments - Eloi Bail, Savoir-faire Linux

SEAPATH is a major project of LF Energy, designed to enable virtualized substations through a secure, scalable, and real-time open-source platform. As adoption grows across the energy sector, the community continues to shape its evolution. In this talk, Eloi Bail, Technical Steering Commitee Chair of SEAPATH, will present the future roadmap of SEAPATH, guided by the collective vision of our contributors and stakeholders. We’ll explore upcoming features aimed at improving deployment, clustering, cybersecurity, and interoperability, crucial for meeting the demands of digital substations. This session offers a forward-looking perspective on how SEAPATH is set to empower the next generation of critical infrastructure.

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.

SBOM & Vulnerabilities in SEAPATH - Mathieu Dupré, Savoir-faire Linux

In Open source summit 2023, Mathieu Dupré and Eloi Bail detailed how SEAPATH uses SBOMs for vulnerability tracking and their search for a robust vulnerability management solution to enhance the security of its open-source platform.

Since this talk, their company decided to create an Open-source solution: VulnScout.io. Mathieu will present how this solution is used on SEAPATH.