Systems and methods for dynamically maintained redundancy and load balancing in software defined control systems for industrial process plants

An industrial process control system comprising:

• a plurality of process control field devices operating to control a physical process in an industrial process plant processing physical input materials to produce a product;
• a communication infrastructure communicatively coupling the plurality of process control field devices to a software-defined control system that receives data from the plurality of process control field devices and transmits commands to the plurality of process control field devices;
• a data cluster, disposed in the industrial process plant, comprising a plurality of compute nodes, the data cluster executing the software defined control system (SDCS), each compute node comprising:
• a processor executing an operating system;
• a memory;
• and
• a communication resource coupled to one or more other compute nodes in the data cluster;
• an application layer comprising a plurality of containers instantiated in the data cluster, each of the plurality of containers being an isolated execution environment executing within the local operating system of a respective compute node of the data cluster, the plurality of instantiated containers cooperating to facilitate execution of a control strategy in the SDCS;
• and
• an orchestrator service configured to:
• configure an input/output (I/O) service container of the plurality of containers to execute an I/O service, the I/O service (i) receiving process data from the plurality of process control field devices and transmitting the process data to each of a plurality of redundant process control routines executing in respective controller containers of the plurality of containers and (ii) receiving control outputs from redundant process control routines executing in the respective controller containers and transmitting to the plurality of process control field devices the outputs from a selected one of the redundant process control routines;
• and
• assign each of the plurality of containers to execute on an available hardware resource of a plurality of hardware resources, selecting the available hardware resource on which each of the plurality of containers will execute so as to maintain for redundant containers redundancy in at least one aspect.