Application and service management for industrial control devices

The subject invention provides systems and methods that facilitate accessing and management of information (e.g., instructions, executables, classes, objects . . . ) associated with a control system. The systems and methods enable a control system entity the ability to leverage functionality of another control system entity, for example, to employ a service and/or execute an application within an execution environment of the other control system entity. Other capabilities include, but are not limited to, installing and uninstalling, registering and deregistering, loading and/or unloading instructions, commencing, pausing and terminating instruction execution, passing parameters and variables to instructions, modifying, overriding instructions and removing instructions, reliable messages, files, executables, classes, data structures, schema, objects, services, notifications, behaviors, alerts, etc. Optionally, a security mechanism can be utilized to determine the scope of access to the control system entity and/or instructions, applications, and services therein.