A control system in an industrial plant is configured to determine whether the source data extracted from the source application is not matched in data structure with the target application, and to transform the source data structure to be matched with the target data structure in accordance with a data structure requirement of the target application if the source data is not matched in data structure with the target data in the target application. The industrial plant control system is configured to perform a hierarchical checking of the data structure between the target application and the source application in a correlated definition status, and perform at least one of updating, deleting and adding the source data from the source application, based at least in part on a result of the hierarchical checking for merging the source data into the target data in the target application.