ENGLISH ABSTRACT: An agent-based simulation model is formulated in this dissertation in order to simulate the population dynamics of Eldana saccharina Walker infestation in sugarcane. The simulation model comprises four ...

Off-road working vehicles are subjected to high levels of vibration input on the rough terrain and irregular roads they work. The human operators are therefore exposed to high levels of whole body vibration (WBV) and at ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The concept of strategic alignment, the “golden thread”, lies at the heart of this research. The idea that all available resources are simultaneously attracted by the magnetic pull of a company’s ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: It is common practice to apply manufacturing practices to services, with the intention of improving services through the practices of manufacturing. One of the manufacturing practices that has proven to ...

This doctoral dissertation focuses on the application of Van-der-Waals’ forces in micromaterial handling. A micro-material handling system consists of four main elements, which include: the micro-gripper, the micro-workpart, ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: A difficult subclass of engineering optimisation problems is the class of optimisation problems which are dynamic and stochastic. These problems are often of a non-closed form and thus studied by means ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Small and medium-sized enterprises form a very important part of any economy. These organisations generally provide 60–70 percent of the employment in countries. The success and growth of SMEs have a ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: A key challenge faced by South African enterprises operating in the market made up of the poorest socio-economic segment, namely the Base of the Pyramid (BOP), pertains to the difficulty of achieving ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: One of the key focus areas for the management of a power utility in a regulated energy market is planned preventative maintenance of the power generating units in its power system. The so- called generator ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The strategic tools and insights that e-business start-ups require to better formulate their competitive strategies are obscured by the staggering amounts of strategy literature that is available. Yet at ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Business-to-business services relating to physical asset management are playing an increasingly important role in industry. This is in the midst of the current pressures which asset owning organisations ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In the context of maritime law enforcement (MLE), a human operator is typically required to make a variety of counter-threat decisions following the detection and evaluation of threats at sea. These ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Manufacturing products ensure value creation from natural resources. The change in manufacturing systems to a greater emphasis on personalisation, increase the need for customised products. Manufacturing ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Back pain is a common concern amongst a growing population of people across the world today, where in most cases the pain can become unbearable resulting in major lifestyle adjustments. Seventy to eighty ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: A telemedicine service is a healthcare service (-medicine) that is delivered over a distance (tele-). The interest in the potential of telemedicine to increase the quality, accessibility, utilization, ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The domination number of a graph is the cardinality of a smallest subset of its vertex set with the property that each vertex of the graph is in the subset or adjacent to a vertex in the subset. This ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: One of the key challenges organisations face is how to enhance the level of performance of their employees. This research focuses on how incentive practices can be used to stimulate employee motivation. ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Innovation is important for competitiveness. It thrives on the availability of novel public and private domain knowledge. Thus the ability to access, analyze, synthesize, share, and re-use knowledge is ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The crucial role of innovation in creating sustainable competitive advantage is widely recognised in industry today. Likewise, the importance of having the required information accessible to the right ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The integrity of an electric power system is significantly threatened by unexpected downtimes of power generating units (PGUs). In order to minimise the occurrence of such unexpected PGU downtimes, planned ...