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).