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;
• 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 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 a first container of the plurality of containers to include a service executing within the first container;
• and
• assign the configured first container to execute on an available hardware resource of a plurality of hardware resources to thereby control a plurality of process control field devices operating in the industrial process plant to produce a product from input materials.