Systems and methods for associating modules in a software defined control system 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;
• 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 the process control field devices and transmits instructions to the plurality of process control field devices;
• a data cluster comprising a plurality of compute nodes, the data cluster executing the software-defined control system, 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;
• a plurality of instantiated containers, each of the plurality of instantiated containers being an isolated execution environment executing within the operating system of a one of the plurality of compute nodes on which the container is instantiated, the plurality of instantiated containers cooperating to facilitate execution of a control strategy in the software-defined control system;
• wherein a first container of the plurality of containers is pinned to a component of the software-defined control system, and
• wherein a second container, executing a service identical to a service executing in the first container, is pinned to a different component of the software-defined control system than the component to which the first container is pinned.