Design Alternatives for Executing Industrial Control Logic Using WebAssembly

Industrial control systems typically rely on proprietary IEC 61131-3 execution engines, which complicate integration with modern development ecosystems and impose significant maintenance burdens. WebAssembly (Wasm) is a portable, lightweight, and sandboxed execution format that offers a promising alternative by bridging industrial control requirements with contemporary software development practices. In this paper, we discuss three architectural alternatives for integrating Wasm into industrial control platforms and implement a standalone Wasm engine enabling polyglot programming while interoperating with legacy IEC 61131-3 components. We evaluate its performance on real-time Linux, demonstrating that Wasm runtimes can meet control loop cycle-time and latency requirements, with only a 1.6–1.9 x slowdown relative to native execution and minimal cycle-time variability (0.0094%). Our results highlight Wasm as a viable and flexible technological foundation for modernizing industrial control systems.