An industrial control system, such as a process control for use in a process plant, uses a hardware/software architecture that makes the system more reactive by making the system more resilient, responsive, and elastic. The industrial control system includes one or more distributed input/output (I/O) controller devices (BFN I/O controllers) which are coupled to field devices within a plant and provide direct or indirect access to the field devices for control and messaging purposes, one or more advanced function and computation nodes, and one or more user nodes coupled to the BFN I/O controllers via a network connection. The advanced function nodes store and execute virtual machines, devices, or entities, which decouples the hardware used in the control system from the software that functions on that hardware, making the system easier to scale, reconfigure, and change. Moreover, the industrial control system uses a self-describing data messaging scheme that provides both the data and a description of the data
