The interest in the temporal structure of production processes goes back, as is well known, to Ricardo (1817), Jevons (1871), and the Austrian theory of capital (Böhm-Bawerk, 1889; Wicksell, 1934; Hayek, 1941). According to this approach, in particular, the final output obtained at any given moment emerges as the result of the use of one or more original production factors at a moment, or in a series of moments, chronologically preceding the date at which the consumer good becomes available. An elementary production process is therefore defined as a process by which a succession of dated quantities of original inputs enables a unit of final product to be obtained.

The notion of production activity as a process of transformation of original factors into consumer goods obviously reduces the role of the means of production to that played by exclusively intermediate products, contained within the individual production processes.

Both the temporal sequencing of the production phases and the integration of the set of production instruments have seemed to represent characteristics which help to make the Austrian method the most suitable for an analysis of the dynamics of an economic system.

To be used for this kind of analysis, however, the Austrian representation of the production process has had to be modified. It goes without saying, in fact, that its vision of linking a sequence of original inputs to the emergence of the final product in a single instant is implicitly related to the idea of a productive configuration that only employs circulating capital.