Funds versus stocks: a note on constraint classification

Even if the industrial production process forms a common frame of reference, the integration of the economist's concepts of production with those of the industrial production engineer may well present a vexed problem. Yet a basic requirement to engineers and economists alike ought to be a proper understanding of the interplay between engineering and economics in the area of industrial production. One solution to this problem may be to consider the production process in the unifying sense of a constraint satisfaction problem. This approach, which is not without merit in the history of science, has its foundation in an interdisciplinary constraint classification, developed originally in analytical mechanics. To illustrate this approach, we demonstrate in this note how the two economic notions of a fund of services and a stock of goods, are recast into two distinct constraint formulations of fundamental importance in the mathematical modelling of industrial production processes.