Universal data access across devices

A system for providing access to locally stored process image data to other devices in an industrial production environment, the system comprising:

• a plurality of controller devices, wherein each respective controller device comprises:
• a volatile computer-readable storage medium comprising a process image area;
• a non-volatile computer-readable storage medium;
• a control program configured to provide operating instructions to a production unit;
• an input/output component configured to update the process image area during each scan cycle or upon the occurrence of one or more events with process image data items associated with the production unit;
• a historian component configured to locally store the process image data items of the process image area as time series data in the non-volatile computer-readable storage medium;
• and
• a process image backbone providing the plurality of controller devices with uniform access to the process image data items of each controller device, the process image backbone configured as a middleware gluing together runtime environments of the plurality of controller devices, such that the process image areas or the historian components of the plurality of controller devices are integrated into a common process image,
• wherein the process image backbone comprises a plurality of process image backbone instances, each process image backbone instance located on one of the plurality of controller devices,
• wherein the process image backbone instance located on each controller device includes a data registry comprising one or more objects semantically describing the process image data items stored on the controller device, the data registry providing a list of process image data items available in the controller device, and a messaging component for communicating data from the data registry over the process image backbone, and
• wherein the control program of a first controller device is configured to use the process image backbone to retrieve one or more process image data items from a second controller device and use the retrieved one or more process image data items to generate the operating instructions for the production unit.