RTE
Modernizing the electrical grid: open source virtualization and interoperability
The need
Industrial virtualization: the challenge of high availability and low latency
As part of the digitization of smart grids, the major energy player, RTE, needed a core infrastructure capable of hosting critical applications. The main objective was to deploy an industrial-class, real-time virtualization platform based on the Linux Energy Foundation's Seapath project. The requirements were twofold: to guarantee absolute high availability and minimal network latency, essential for the secure operation of the national electricity grid.
The challenge
Improving the reliability of digital control through simulation and multithreaded optimization
The challenge was to stabilize a virtualization platform under extreme time constraints by eliminating all residual latency. On the software side, the objective was to design a high-performance protocol conversion plugin (IEC 61850 to Fledge) using a multithreaded architecture. The team had to validate all data exchanges through simulation, as there was no physical hardware available during the initial development phases.
3v000
electrical substations in France
100,000 km
airlines
5,000 km
underground lines
Our approach
Real-time optimization, interoperability and industrialization
Smile has deployed comprehensive expertise, ranging from low-level development (Linux kernel) to IoT middleware.
- IoT & FledgePower Development: design of a "South" plugin for the Fledge platform, providing the interface with the IEC 61850 protocol. Use of the libiec61850 library and development of a robust event-driven architecture for telemetry reporting.
- Industrial software quality: implementation of strict continuous integration (CI/CD) pipelines including static analysis (SonarCloud, cppcheck) and automated testing to guarantee code reliability without immediate hardware access.
- System & Real-Time Optimization (Seapath): Detailed analysis of Linux kernel latencies (ftrace), correction of network latency bugs (XDP, vhost-net) and optimization of virtual machine clock synchronization (ptpkvm).
- Infrastructure reliability: Corrections made to the cluster manager (Pacemaker) placement algorithms and integration of hardware drivers (watchdogs) into Debian.
The result
The result: towards the electrical substation of the future
Thanks to this collaboration, the client now has a stable and high-performance virtualization infrastructure. The delivered software components (Fledge plugins) ensure complete interoperability between legacy equipment and new digital management systems. This project has also enriched the open-source ecosystem through direct contributions to the Linux Foundation Energy.
Working on Seapath required us to push the boundaries of standard virtualization. By correcting algorithm flaws in Pacemaker or tracking micro-latencies in OpenVSwitch, we didn't just integrate a solution: we strengthened the technological foundation that will allow the electrical grid of tomorrow to operate on open standards.
Christophe Brunschweiler
Director of Embedded & IoT
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