Real-time network traffic handling in FASA

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 event-driven 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).