Process

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Process (disambiguation).

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 the 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 ^{[citation needed]}.

Illustration of a physical process: a geyser in "action".

[edit] Examples

From an engineering perspective, industrial and environmental processes relate to the sequence of operations and involved events, taking up time, space, expertise or other resources, which lead/(should lead) to the production of some outcome. The changes they may create in the properties of one or more objects under their influence are especially important for their identification and design. Compare: project

From mathematical and physical perspectives processes are categorized, for example, as continuous, discrete, convergent, asymptotic, incremental, singular, recurrent and periodic.

A singular process would be one which has a singular property or occurs rarely.

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:

The Bessemer process is a way of producing steel.
In thermodynamics, an adiabatic process or an isocaloric process is a process in which no heat is transferred to or from working fluid.
The process of mining extracts ore.
Evolution is a natural process which explains the adaptation of species over long periods of time. (generally assumed to be an example of a recurrent process)
The creation of the universe by God would be an example of a divine process. (generally assumed to be a singular process)
Learning is a process, as are teaching and training
Process music
Civic governance and conflict resolution
Error correction in the information processing of a stream of data.
Protein biosynthesis