The equipment I refer to is part of an overall interconnected system, and in real life, all of them are running at the same time as part of a cluster of equipment. There are some interactions (material can be passed between them), so we need to be monitoring I/O and charts on multiple pieces of equipment at the same time. We currently to this from a PC by opening multiple sessions of PAC Control at the same time.
Note that each equipment has a different IP address, and the include files we download to each equipment have differences among them. The ability to define separate control engines handles these differences, as the IP Address and path to the include files are specified per control engine. However, when you compile a strategy to get a download file, you can only do it for the currently active control engine.
The bigger problem is that once you have opened a strategy, you cannot open that same strategy in another session of PAC Control. If you want to see what is happening on two different pieces of equipment at the same time, you need to use difference strategies, one for each controller.
I saw the forum thread about scaling analog I/O. Personally, I do not like the idea of mucking with the memory map to change individual I/O configuration settings. You now have chart logic in the control layer directly coupled with low level details of the I/O layer. It would be better to have high level commands to get and set I/O point attributes.