Patent attributes
A recipe management system includes a versioning system that tracks the revision history of templates and their child instances. Modifications to templates and instances create new records with new primary key identifiers and version identifiers. However, each new version of a template or instance has the same root identifier as the prior versions. When a template is modified, a flag is set in its child instances, but they are not modified automatically. When an instance is modified, it has no effect on the parent template. At runtime, a recipe model is loaded to an equipment model to execute a recipe on a piece of equipment. Only approved versions of equipment models are used during execution, even if newer versions exist. During execution, new equipment models can be created. The recipe management system includes an execution engine that can be hosted as a standalone executable or in a system platform.