ENGLISH ABSTRACT: South African industry faces immense global competition from developed countries such as Germany probably because of the adoption of lean manufacturing techniques by the latter. This study is a survey on ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The successful execution of a physical asset management strategy is an important value driver for organisations that are highly dependent on the service delivery of physical assets. Research demonstrates ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Automation can effectively improve productivity. A recent shift from hard to flexible automation boosted the robotics and machine vision technology as options for implementation. The principle of machine ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Railway systems can pose complex problems for the scheduling and operation of trains. A passenger rail service’s first priority is to provide a punctual and safe transport service to its customers. But ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The purpose of this paper is to present a mechanism that can assist physical asset management (PAM) practitioners and academics with the early detection and management of PAM strategy execution failure. ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: South Africa has a high-cost, low-performance education system, which ultimately leads to unemployment and a skill shortage in the country. In order to bridge the skill shortage gap at a tertiary level, ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The subject of residual stresses induced by the Selective Laser Melting (SLM) process has been one of the main focus areas in literature over the past decade. It has been reported that residual stresses ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Reliability of evaluation refers to the repeatibility of results when similar tests are repeated by the same student, or a similar evaluation procedure is applied. By measuring reliability an objective, ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This paper focuses on the employment of copper and aluminium in a micro-material handling system actuated by Van der Waals forces. Electron beam (e-beam) evaporator deposited both materials on a silicon ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Van der Waals forces and other adhesive forces impose great challenges on micro-material handling. Mechanical grippers fail to release micro-parts reliably because of them. This paper explores how the ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The maintenance and management of railway infrastructure plays a central role in ensuring the reliability and availability of rail transport. In a highly competitive transport market, the rail industry ...

The ability of a coal-fired power station to meet its generation targets is influenced by periods of coal shortage. In this article, we propose a multi-objective inventory model to assist with the management of coal ...

Carbon monoxide (CO) is a by-product of the ilmenite smelting process from which titania slag and pig iron are produced. Prior to this project, the CO at Tronox KZN Sands in South Africa was burnt to get rid of it, producing ...

The cash management of an autoteller machine (ATM) is a multi-objective optimisation problem which aims to maximise the service level provided to customers at minimum cost. This paper focus on improved cash management in ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful technique to develop intelligent agents in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This paper proposes a new RL algorithm called the Temporal-Difference value ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Excellence in manufacturing follows immediately from the complementary attributes of productivity and quality. Both have a cultural and technical component. A culture ofexcellence in both doing the right ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The moderation of examination answer books is an area where quality assurance is essential, and should be employed to ensure that an examination paper’s standard, content and span, marking, etc. are ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The hyper-competitive nature of e-business has raised the need for a generic way to appraise the merit of a developed business strategy. Although progress has been made in the domain of strategy evaluation, ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The resource constrained scheduling problem involves the scheduling of a number of activities over time, where each activity consumes one or more resources per time period. For a feasible solution to ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: A variety of production management philosophies are discussed in the literature and implemented in industry. This paper will present a framework for the comparison of such management approaches. Each ...