Message management facility for an industrial process control environment

A message monitor within a node, in a process control network environment, separate from a control processor for monitoring a stream of messages received from the control processor and initiate executing a command in response to detecting particular identified messages in the stream of messages, the message monitor comprising:

• a message table including a set of message table entries, each entry comprising:
• a message ID, and a
• command ID;
• a message receiver including a message monitoring functionality for:
• receiving a message including a message ID value,
• identifying a categorized message by locating an entry in the message table corresponding to the received message, and
• determining a dynamic priority value of a message, the priority value being determined based in part on the operation mode of the message receiver;
• and
• command execution functionality that initiates executing a command associated with the command ID, of the entry in the message table for the categorized message, in association with the message receiver identifying the categorized message.

A message management facility within a node, in a process control network environment, separate from a control processor for regulating flow of a stream of messages, received from the control processor to a set of supervisory destinations, in response to sensing a message shower condition, the message management facility comprising:

• a message receiver for receiving a stream of messages including an initial priority value, the initial priority value dynamically changing based in part on the operation mode of the message receiver;
• a destination server for transmitting messages from the stream of messages received by the message receiver to one or more network destinations;
• and
• a message shower condition detector for detecting message shower conditions, and wherein a message shower suppression criterion, invoked in response to detecting message shower conditions, is applied to the stream of messages to limit passing messages to the network destinations via the destination server.