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Process (lat. processus - movement) is a naturally occurring or designed sequence of changes of properties/attributes of a system/object. More precisely, and from the most general systemic perspective, every process is representable as a particular trajectory (or part thereof) in a system's phase space. Every measurement is a process. The process of measurement is the fundamental concept in physics, and, in practice, in every field of science and engineering. Identification of a process is also a subjective task, because the whole universe demonstrates one continuous universal "process", and every arbitrarily selected human behaviour can be conceptualized as a process. This aspect of the process recognition is closely dependent on human cognitive factors. According to the observations included in the systemic TOGA meta-theory, the concepts: system, process, function and goal are closely and formally connected, and, in parallel, every process has the system property, i.e. can be seen as an abstract dynamic system/object, and arbitrarily divided on network of processes. This division depends of the character of the changes, and on socio-cognitive factors, such as: their perception tools and goal of the observer. For the above goal-oriented reason, from the industrial managerial point of view, the following inputs can be initially applied in an engineering process specification: people, machines and tools, materials, energy, information, professional knowledge, capital, time and space .
Examples Few processes in nature can be considered singular. Most processes found in nature are recurrent, or repeat more than once. Recurring processes which repeat at a constant rate are considered periodic. The more periodic a process is the more useful it is as the basis of a clock. Various specific processes: See also | ||||||||
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