Real-time network traffic handling in FASA

Abstract

FASA (Future Automation System Architecture) is a scalable, flexible, and platform-independent real-time execution framework for executing cyclic applications on multiple CPU cores or even across multiple devices. By design, FASA does not support event-driven tasks, such as handling of I/O and network communication. However, providing support for event handling is vital to broaden FASA's applicability to other domains, for instance, digital substation automation, where we have distributed automation systems with event-driven real-time communication services. In this work, we discuss solutions for enabling eventdriven communication services in FASA and present an example design that integrates IEC 61850 real-time communication services into FASA. The design is implemented on Linux OS with Preempt-RT patch, and using an open-source library, Rapid61850, that provides the necessary APIs for IEC 61850 communication. We evaluate the implementation with respect to handling two IEC 61850 real-time communication services, namely Sampled Values and GOOSE (Generic Object-Oriented Substation Events).

Real-time research lab in the Sundom smart grid pilot

“…Figure 4 describes our setup. Protection and control applications for the smart grid are run using FASA while the IEC 61850 communication stack runs on a different dedicated core as described in [4]. SV and GOOSE frames are captured and decoded by the stack, which stores them in ring buffer structures in shared memory.…”

Migrating legacy control software to multi-core hardware

“…Since FASA does not provide a concept for handling event-driven tasks, such as processing network traffic, we use an approach that has been proposed by Eidenbenz et al [20]. The approach relies on a non-FASA process that handles the network interrupts and communicates with the FASA application through inter-process communication, i.e., it puts the data into shared memory, where FASA blocks of a specific type, so-called proxies, fetch the data periodically and deliver it to the consuming FASA blocks.…”