Some of the basic innovative trends of the industrial environment, today, are the shift from centralized control architectures to distributed systems, as well as the increasing degree of heterogeneity. These features impose the need for special software tools that support the design of control applications in a homogeneous and interoperable way, as well as their distribution to the interconnected participating industrial devices. The utilisation of the internet and the provision of e-services to the industry will also lead to the distribution of management functionalities in addition to control code distribution. Such an evolution requires both a new model for industrial devices as well as a design and deployment tool that will make possible the distribution of functionalities to industrial devices. This paper presents the state-of-the-art considering distributed industrial system design and concludes with a specification of distributed systems, enabling the incorporation of novel advanced functionalities.