The systems and methods described provide improved process control operating range and capabilities and integrate process control monitoring and management with broader process automation (PA) systems process management, extending the real-time operation and control of a process control system to process handling of a PA system, and extending PA-style process management by adding real-time process controls and monitoring, and adding new functionality by permitting management of these processes to externally defined completion goals. This combination provides new functionality in dynamically determined process flexibility, extended operating range and extended process recipe definition capabilities for process control systems using this technology, and provides improved error recovery and exception handling of traditional PA systems.