Material reservation distribution system and method

A material reservation method for industrial automation systems, comprising:

• associating recipe materials with a model;
• linking the model to an industrial control process;
• employing the model to determine equipment within the industrial control process to manufacture the recipe;
• and
• associating the model with an inventory database.

A material reservation system for an industrial control process, comprising:

• means for tracking to an inventory database having at least one material model;
• means for associating the at least one material model to an Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) database that is automatically undated in accordance with the at least one material model activities;
• means for executing an automated industrial control process in accordance with at least one attribute from the material model;
• means for communicating between the inventory database and the automated industrial control process to facilitate manufacture of a recipe.

A computer readable medium having stored thereon a data structure for a factory automation system, comprising:

• a first data field to describe material requirements of a recipe, the recipe employable in an automated industrial process;
• a second data field to describe containers that store one or more materials of the recipe;
• and
• a third data field to provide communications access to the automated industrial control process, the third data field an object interface.