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The legal reform process in South Africa has led to increasingly complex legislative requirements for new developments in the form of various authorization processes. Currently different organs of state, at different spheres of government exercise a range of powers and functions in respect of the approval of development applications. These authorisations typically relate to planning, water management, heritage resources, environmental management, air quality, etc. In order to improve the efficiency and alignment of authorisation processes there is a serious need to gain a better understanding of the interaction between the different authorisation processes as well as the challenges experienced. This research presents the results of a critical analysis of planning and environmental impact assessment (EIA) authorisation processes in the Mpumalanga Province and examines how authorisation processes are implemented and aligned, how efficient the processes are, why process inefficiencies occur and how the efficiency of processes can be improved. The outcome of the research suggests that there are three main success factors for efficiency, namely the legislative framework that provides for administrative and environmental justice, co-operative governance that provides the basis for good communication, and information and competence that injects expertise into the authorisation process. The so-called 'efficiency triangle' is conceptualised, which clearly illustrates the interaction between these success factors. / Thesis (M. Environmental Management)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

The legal reform process in South Africa has led to increasingly complex legislative requirements for new developments in the form of various authorization processes. Currently different organs of state, at different spheres of government exercise a range of powers and functions in respect of the approval of development applications. These authorisations typically relate to planning, water management, heritage resources, environmental management, air quality, etc. In order to improve the efficiency and alignment of authorisation processes there is a serious need to gain a better understanding of the interaction between the different authorisation processes as well as the challenges experienced. This research presents the results of a critical analysis of planning and environmental impact assessment (EIA) authorisation processes in the Mpumalanga Province and examines how authorisation processes are implemented and aligned, how efficient the processes are, why process inefficiencies occur and how the efficiency of processes can be improved. The outcome of the research suggests that there are three main success factors for efficiency, namely the legislative framework that provides for administrative and environmental justice, co-operative governance that provides the basis for good communication, and information and competence that injects expertise into the authorisation process. The so-called 'efficiency triangle' is conceptualised, which clearly illustrates the interaction between these success factors. / Thesis (M. Environmental Management)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

Time delays are of long-standing interest in the study of control systems since they appear in many practical control problems and tend to degrade overall system performance. In this thesis, we consider two distinct problems involving uncertain time delays. The first problem that we consider is the achievable delay margin problem, which is determining the longest delay for which stability can be maintained when using a linear time invariant (LTI) controller. This problem has been considered in continuous-time, where bounds (often tight) have been found for plants with non-zero right half plane poles. In this work, we consider the discrete-time case, where we prove that an LTI controller exists which stabilizes the plant and the plant with a one step delay if and only if the plant has no negative, real unstable poles. The second problem that we consider is stabilizing any continuous-time single-input single-output LTI plant with an arbitrarily large time delay and gain. To solve this problem, we propose a simple generalized hold whose resulting discretized system is amenable to adaptive control. Furthermore, by exploiting the structure of the resulting discretized system, we propose purpose built estimators for the unknown gain and delay, which allows us to not only provide bounded-input bounded-output (BIBO) closed-loop stability, but also guarantees the exponential decay of any plant initial conditions, robustness to un-modelled dynamics, and tolerance to occasional, possibly persistent, jumps in the gain and delay. Furthermore, for the case of a first order plant, a similar, but suitably modified controller is shown to tolerate continuous variation of the unknown delay while still providing BIBO closed-loop stability.

Time delays are of long-standing interest in the study of control systems since they appear in many practical control problems and tend to degrade overall system performance. In this thesis, we consider two distinct problems involving uncertain time delays. The first problem that we consider is the achievable delay margin problem, which is determining the longest delay for which stability can be maintained when using a linear time invariant (LTI) controller. This problem has been considered in continuous-time, where bounds (often tight) have been found for plants with non-zero right half plane poles. In this work, we consider the discrete-time case, where we prove that an LTI controller exists which stabilizes the plant and the plant with a one step delay if and only if the plant has no negative, real unstable poles. The second problem that we consider is stabilizing any continuous-time single-input single-output LTI plant with an arbitrarily large time delay and gain. To solve this problem, we propose a simple generalized hold whose resulting discretized system is amenable to adaptive control. Furthermore, by exploiting the structure of the resulting discretized system, we propose purpose built estimators for the unknown gain and delay, which allows us to not only provide bounded-input bounded-output (BIBO) closed-loop stability, but also guarantees the exponential decay of any plant initial conditions, robustness to un-modelled dynamics, and tolerance to occasional, possibly persistent, jumps in the gain and delay. Furthermore, for the case of a first order plant, a similar, but suitably modified controller is shown to tolerate continuous variation of the unknown delay while still providing BIBO closed-loop stability.

A new data capturing technique for a potentially coupled bus of lines is proposed that always accommodates fast operation. The proposed method utilizes multiple reference voltages available within a line's receiving logic and the initial conditions of the involved wires in order to determine early and accurately the transmitted data in the current cycle. The presented data reading technique rarely requires repeater insertion and it can considerably accelerate signal propagation. The introduced logic at the receiver-end of a victim wire entails an affordable area overhead. Experimental results are given in the 65nm CMOS process for interconnects of various lengths. An architecture is proposed that allows for data reading with fault detection capability on lines which are likely to operate under a potentially wide range of capacitive coupling. In order to develop such a methodology, multiple reference or threshold voltages in the receiving logic of the lines are considered instead of typically one. The proposed technique utilizes the additional reference voltages to evaluate whether an intermittent fault has occurred during the capture of the transmitted data. Some combinational logic is introduced on the receiver side to accomplish this task. The mechanism is initially illustrated on a line with one adjacent aggressor. Subsequently, the case of a line with two adjacent aggressors is discussed and it is shown how to generalize the technique for wide buses. In this work the efficiency of the detection mechanism is evaluated for both single and multiple faulty occurrences. A novel circuit to treat crosstalk induced glitches on local interconnects is presented. Design irregularities and manufacturing defects on wires may result in spurious electrical events that impact the reliability of the interconnect infrastructure. The proposed methods act by dynamically adjusting the threshold voltage of the receiving gate on the victim line. The proposed technique can be used in combination with encoding algorithms on data buses. A comparative study in the 180nm CMOS process is presented that supports the applicability of the approach. Transient faults due to radiation have become increasingly observable in combinational logic. This is due to the weakening of inherent protective mechanisms that logic traditionally held against such flawed spurious events. Further boosting of such effects is increasingly probable due to the interaction of transients appearing at the inputs of logic gates. Such multiple instances of transients can arise either because of re-convergent circuit paths or because of significant reduction in the critical charge of modern technologies. The latter, in particular, makes more than one circuit nodes susceptible to the same high energy ions. A static transient propagation is employed to address possible transient interaction and to compute its worst-case effects in logic. The quantified effects of interest are the maximum duration and slope of the resulting hazards at the circuit outputs. A hardening methodology is also proposed to protect combinational logic from such events. For this purpose, filtering circuits are inserted in logic and several placement algorithms are developed and evaluated.

Protection against delays in administrative proceedings and in proceedings before administrative courts Abstract The subject of this work are delays in administrative proceedings (where its legislation marks them as inaction) and before administrative courts. A delay is a state in which a certain act in the proceedings for some reason is not undertaken at the time within which it should be done. Reasons for delays may vary. They may be objective, which may consist of a number of cases that a person decides, whether it is due to insufficient staffing of the authorities in charge of the proceedings, or because of the deficiencies in the organization of work with that authorities, or may consist in the necessity of following the sequence of a process involving the necessity to perform an act that precedes the given operation. Reasons for delays can also be subjective, due to the lack of speed of work, either due to laziness or incompetence. The Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms speaks of the duty to discuss the matter without unnecessary delays. This obligation applies both to administrative proceedings and to proceedings at the administrative courts. Since this is a law regulation, which applies to constitutional order, other legal norms can not contain a rule that would be inconsistent with the...

A teleoperation system is a master-slave robotic system in which the master and slave robots are at different geographical locations and synchronize their motions through the communication channel, with the goal of enabling the human operator to interact with a remote environment. The two primary objectives of bilateral teleoperation systems, position tracking and force feedback, are necessary for providing the user with high fidelity telepresence. However, time delays in communication channels impede the realization of the two objectives and even destabilize the system. To guarantee stability and improve performance, several damping injection-based controllers have been developed in this thesis for two channel and four channel teleoperation systems. For two channel teleoperation, an adaptive bounded state feedback controller has firstly been proposed to address teleoperation with time-varying delays, model uncertainties and bounded actuations. Next, a simplified and augmented globally exponentially convergent velocity observer has been designed and incorporated in the conventional P+d control to obtain stable bilateral teleoperation without using velocity measurements. Then, the more challenging bounded output feedback control problem has been solved by combining the bounded state feedback control and output feedback control two techniques with more conservative control gains. In four channel teleoperation, a hybrid damping and stiffness adjustment strategy has been introduced to tightly constrain the master and slave robots and achieve robust stability. Further, the nonsingular version is developed to conquer the singularity problem in the hybrid strategy, which has been proved to avoid unexpected torque spikes due to the singularity problem at zero velocities. Besides, this thesis has also provided a reduced-order controller to guarantee position coordination for arbitrarily large position errors and maintain the tight coupling between the master and slave sites. After concluding all the research results, future study directions are pointed out at the end of this thesis. / Graduate

Master of Public Health - MPH / Access to appropriate health care service during childbirth is a great challenge to many women in Africa and Namibia is no exception. More than 70% of women in Otjozondjupa region experienced some form of delay during childbirth, and while maternal mortality continued to rise over the years in Namibia it is currently at about 265/100 000, which is too high for a middle-income country. Hence, this study aimed to get a deeper understanding of the perceptions of women who experienced any of the three delays in accessing appropriate health care during childbirth in Otjiwarongo hospital.

El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. / This study focuses on the factors that cause project delays in an industrial hydraulic company. More specifically, the article also addresses the development of on-demand engineered products and the impact of the procurement process on delays. As part of the investigation, the authors assessed the historical data of the projects completed in 2017 before determining the critical path for each project in an attempt to identify which project stages may be improved. After further assessing the resulting data, the planning and procurement procedures were deemed as requiring improvement. Next, the article proposes a training plan and new procedures based on the Project Management Body of Knowledge guidelines for Engineer-to-Order projects. In conclusion, the results showed that delays were effectively reduced after implementing these new procedures in both Project Management stages.