Orientador: Orlando Fontes Lima Junior / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Civil, Arquitetura e Urbanismo / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-23T21:07:50Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Avoleta_AmandaQuintal_M.pdf: 2120211 bytes, checksum: 1342fc21a341b82751b3e3bd9bf99c33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Resumo: O objetivo desse trabalho centrou-se em desenvolver um modelo para dimensionamento do número de embalagens do tipo "múltiplas viagens" (multiway), em uma cadeia de suprimentos de laço fechado. Tais embalagens retornam à cadeia depois de acondicionarem o produto ao seu destino final. Em seu retorno passam por um processo de manutenção (reparo, limpeza), para voltarem a sua forma original e, então, são estocadas para próximo uso. Uma embalagem, em seu ciclo de acondicionamento do produto, está sujeita a incertezas associadas aos seguintes fatores: demanda do produto final; tempo de viagem com o produto; tempo de permanência no ponto de consumo; tempo de retorno ao ponto de reuso; tempo de manutenção para o próximo uso; e sua indisponibilidade afeta significativamente o nível de atendimento ao cliente. Embora exista um vasto material sobre o gerenciamento da cadeia direta, os estudos sobre cadeia reversa são mais raros e se prendem principalmente a estudos de configurações para o fluxo em retorno e seus custos. No dimensionamento do número ideal de embalagens para atendimento do consumidor, com um nível adequado de suprimento, não são encontrados trabalhos que considerem a questão da aleatoriedade dos tempos de viagem relacionada à gestão dessas embalagens. A proposta deste trabalho consistiu em estabelecer um procedimento para os tratamentos dos dados, visto que são aleatórios, e disponibilizar um modelo simulação que auxiliasse a gestão de cadeias com embalagens multiway. A aplicação é feita em uma cadeia voltada para o comércio de flores, pela necessidade de acondicionamento destas em embalagens que as protejam de danos durante o período de manipulação e viagens. Por questões econômicas, são utilizadas embalagens retornáveis que, após serem utilizadas, reintegram-se à cadeia de suprimentos, tornando-a uma cadeia de suprimentos de laço fechado / Abstract: The purpose of this research was to develop a model to quantify the number of multiway packaging, which involves several journeys within a closed loop supply chain. This type of packaging returns to the chain after the goods reach their final destination. Subsequently the packaging proceed to a maintenance process (repair, cleaning) in order to return to its original condition and then be stocked for future use. The storage cycle of a package is subject to uncertainties associated to several factors such as the demand of the final product; the time spent on carriage; the dwell time at the consumption site; the time spent until it returns to the reusing site, and the time of maintenance for next use. The unavailability of the package affects meaningfully the customer attendance level. Although there is a wide set of studies on managing direct chains, studies about the reverse logistics are scarcer and mostly focused on the return process flow configuration and its costs. Regarding the definition of the ideal number of packaging to assist customers with proper supplies, it has neither been found any study that considers the randomization of the time spent on the transportation nor on the management of these packages. The aim of this analysis was to establish a protocol to manipulate data, considering it as being arbitrary, and then to release a simulation model which would benefit managing the multiway packaging chain. The application was done in a chain of a flower business, due to their need of keeping their product in a suitable package that had to protect it from damages during transportation and handling. For economical reasons, returnable packages that can be reinstated to the supply chain are used so that the process is turned into a closed loop / Mestrado / Transportes / Mestra em Engenharia Civil

Master of Arts / Department of Geography / Jida Wang / In the 1950s-60s, the world was experiencing a dramatic increase in artificial water impoundments in an unprecedented effort to eliminate spatial and temporal variations in water accessibility. Dam construction has since decreased, but recently, efforts to supply water and power to a booming world population may once again spark another dam construction boom. Water supplies in some regions are already highly stressed in an effort to satisfy the ever-growing water demand for agriculture, industrial, and domestic uses. With nearly 30% of the world’s population living in water-scarce regions, an improved understanding of total stored surface water has never been more needed. Yet, a complete and spatially-explicit, worldwide inventory of such storage capabilities is lacking. Using several open-source dam registries and high-resolution global lake mapping datasets extracted from thousands of Landsat images, we here aim to provide an updated and spatially-explicit inventory of dams and artificial reservoirs across the world. The following research uses novel techniques to merge 5 authoritative, open-source dam registries into a single dam and reservoir dataset, which we deemed as the Global Dam and Reservoir Inventory (GDRI). In total, GDRI documents 89,500 dams and 83,767 reservoirs for a total capacity of 8,492km3 and total surface area of 754,551km2. Reservoirs account for approximately 2.5% of the Earth’s terrestrial water. In other words, 1 unit of water for every 40 units has been artificially created. Further downscaling of the non-geocoded records provided by the International Commission of Large Dams (ICOLD) using similar geocoding methods allowed for the thorough use of all available ICOLD records. Additional capacity estimates from downscaled ICOLD records increased the GDRI capacity documentation to 8,603km3 and surface area documentation to 859,271km2. Compared to its counterpart, the Global Reservoir and Dam dataset (GRanD), GDRI increased the number of dams documented by 1204%, reservoirs by 1127%, total capacity by 37%, and total surface area by 68%. Initial water impoundment from dam construction activities can lower sea level by permanently trapping water storage on land. Dam construction resulted in an equivalent sea level drop (SLD) of 23.4mm or 0.08mm/yr. Since the dam construction boom of the 1950s-1960s, yearly SLD increased to 0.27mm/yr. By considering the hydrological characteristics of dam location, in terms of endorheic and exorheic basins, we found that exclusion of endorheic located dams decreases the overall effect on SLD by 5.47% or 1.28mm. Failure to consider the hydrologic characteristic of dam location can result in the overestimation of dam-induced SLD. After the dam construction boom of the 1950s-1960s, the world has seen a decreasing trend in dam construction, but developing countries (China, Brazil, India) are still actively pursuing dam projects that are larger and more ambitious than ever before. We see less developed countries often lack the capabilities for dam construction possibly increasing stress on natural water supplies in those regions. The datasets produced are by no means perfect. Overall, the described procedures should be considered a heuristic model, where fastidious quality assurance and automated procedures work to thoroughly eliminate many of the issues encountered with the dataset production, but errors may still exist. However, duplication between the contributing dam datasets, spatial limitations of the lake datasets, imperfect geocoding procedures, and inclusion of more dam datasets provide opportunity for future refinement and improvement of the datasets. This research contributes vital information about anthropogenic water resources that incrementally enhances our knowledge of global hydrology and the interactions taking place between different water entities.

M.Phil. (Industrial Psychology) / The equivalent cross-cultural assessment of personality has long been a debatable subject in psychological research. Personologists remain divided as to the universality of personality traits, and as such, their cross-cultural applicability. This argument remains valid within the South African multicultural and multilingual context. In addition to the applicability of various imported personality measures, South Africa’s past misuse of psychological assessments for unfair discriminatory purposes has created many negative perceptions of their utility. This was further corroborated with the promulgation of the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998 that stipulates that all psychological assessments used in South Africa need to meet the criteria of: a) being scientifically shown to be valid and reliable; b) can be applied fairly to all employees; and c) not biased against any employee or group (Government Gazette, 1998). Currently no validated indigenous model and measure of personality exists in South Africa. Psychological assessments are mainly imported from the United States of America (US) and United Kingdom (UK) and normed to the South African population. Foxcroft, Roodt and Abrahams (2005) acknowledge that many of these assessments, in addition to many locally developed measures, have not been tested for bias nor have they been cross-culturally validated. Furthermore, the theories, models and taxonomies on which these measures are based were developed within a Western context and as such, have not incorporated the unique intricacies of the South African context and its array of cultures and languages. Therefore, the accurate and appropriate measure of personality within South Africa has been impeded.

Class of 2005 Abstract / Objectives: To determine the impact of tightly controlled inventory reduction on customer satisfaction and partial fill costs. Methods: The project was a cross-sectional study employing two survey instruments and a time in motion analysis to determine the number of “we-owes” filled by pharmacies due to inventory reduction, the costs that arise from such reductions, and the impact on customer satisfaction. The first survey instrument was sent to four pharmacies in the Fry’s Food and Drug chain. The survey assessed number of “we-owes” per pharmacy and reasons for having them. The second survey consisted of several statements concerning customer satisfaction. The participants were asked to rate their agreement with each statement using a response scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). A time-in-motion analysis was performed at two pharmacies averaging 350 prescriptions per day to record the amount of labor involved in filling “we-owes". Results: Medium to high volume Fry’s pharmacy fills an average of forty “we owes” each week. The average yearly costs for filling the “we owes” ranges from $171,579 to $568,796 per year depending on the job status of people filling the “we owes.” The main reason for these partially filled prescriptions was the minimum order point was incorrect accounted for 53.8% of the “we owes Almost half of customers owed medication felt it was not inconvenient them to pick the remainder of their prescription and that over half have had this happen more than once. Implications: The costs of tight inventory control need to be compared with the savings obtained from maintaining marginal inventories.

Chain of custody in the forest sector is very dependent on effectively tracking products though the supply chain and manufacturing processes, including sawmilling, drying, planing, and pulp processes. The effectiveness of a tracking system is largely influenced by the characteristics of the process it works within, the nature of the tracking system being used, and increasingly by the penetration of technologically advanced material tracking methods into on-the-ground CoC practices. A variety of CoC systems that exist in the global marketplace accommodate the use of advanced materials tracking systems as a tool for their their implementation. These advances not only offer the potential to reinforce the traceability of products in inventory, but also promote maintenance of their certified status between the various organizations that exist along the wood product supply chain, and ultimately to the end consumer. In the past, a number of different product tracking methods have been used, all of which suffer certain shortcomings in the challenging environment of the forest industry, and the extremely complex nature of Chain of Custody tracking. This work explores the development of a novel material tracking method using the innate IR signatures of polymeric compounds, varied by compound and concentration to develop millions of potential combinations, and consequently millions of unique identities. The combined variation of multiple IR peak frequencies and magnitudes provide the conceptual basis of a chemical barcode system, named "Chemi-Code", to be explored. To prove the validity of this concept, a series of polymers were assayed for suitability in such a system by tracking their IR response stability in the presence of solar UV radiation and over time. As well, the feasibility of varying polymer concentration, and subsequently identification of concentrations by DRIFT spectroscopy was explored by constructing response curves between polymer concentration and peak absorbance, and assessing associated error. Seven polymers were identified and assessed. Only two of these polymers were found to be sufficiently stable for use in the context of the forest industry, and of those two, only one behaved in a manner that would allow peak absorbance to be used as an identifiable chemical variable. Although only one of the seven polymers was suitable for use in the "Chemi-Code" system, the study did demonstrate the validity of the concept by showing that polymers can be exploited for use in such a system. / Forestry, Faculty of / Graduate

Each year, psychology departments across South Africa are faced with the arduous task of selecting the most suitable candidates to fill their Clinical, Counselling, Educational, and Industrial Psychology master’s coursework programmes. Although various criteria are considered in this process, personality has long been considered an important variable in the screening and selection of master’s psychology applicants, and some sort of personality assessment is commonly utilized by selection committees as part of the screening and selection procedures. While there are many different theoretical perspectives on personality and various personality assessment measures available, the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality has gained considerable attention over the last decade as a comprehensive and universal conceptualization of a broad trait structure for human personality. Currently, the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) is considered to be one of the best commercially available measures of the personality traits proposed by this model. The NEO PI-R provides a comprehensive measure of adult personality, has been extensively researched, and has demonstrated its utility across many different cultures, languages, and contexts. The aim of this study was to explore and describe the personality profiles of short-listed master’s psychology applicants at a higher education institution in South Africa, using the NEO PI-R, in an effort to explore the use of NEO PI-R profiles in the selection of master’s psychology applicants. The study was exploratory descriptive in nature and employed a quantitative research method. The sample of 247 participants was selected according to non-probability convenience sampling and was sourced from an archival research database. As part of the application process at the higher education institution, applicants were required to complete various tests, tasks, and questionnaires. The questionnaires selected for this study included a biographical questionnaire, used to describe the biographical variables of the sample, and the NEO PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1992), used as a measure of personality. The NEO PI-R has been found to have good validity and reliability, with reliability in particular having being established in the South African context. Descriptive and inferential statistics, including correlations, cluster xiv analysis, and multivariate analysis of variance (ANOVA), were utilized to analyze the data. Key findings revealed that overall, the group of short-listed master’s psychology applicants could be described as being emotionally well-adjusted and sociable, which is in line with previous national and international research. In addition, a cluster analysis revealed three significantly different personality subgroups within the total sample, thus highlighting the heterogeneous nature of this sample of applicants. Each of the three personality subgroups exhibited significantly different personality traits which were judged to be more or less suitable for potential psychologists-in-training. Clusters 1 and 2 exhibited the most desirable personality characteristics in relation to selection into a master’s psychology programme, while Cluster 3 exhibited the least desirable traits. Various classification functions were derived which classified applicants into “selected” and “not selected” groups as well as the three personality subgroups, which could aid selection committees in the future to screen out potentially unsuitable candidates earlier in the selection process. It was concluded that the use of NEO PI-R personality profiles could aid the screening and selection of short-listed master’s psychology applicants.

Organisations are constantly expected to be more competitive while working in an environment in which time and cost are limited, thereby preventing such organisations from taking the time required to be responsive. The supply chain provides a critical linkage between various organisations which should seek collective opportunities to improve performance. It is, therefore, important that organisations understand that conventional knowledge and methods will not serve unless there is a concerted focus on improvement of organisational performance toward fulfilling increased expectations, not just maintaining that which is comfortable. A more sustainable approach may be the introduction of supply chain best practice. An optimal supply chain is one that continuously strives to reduce unnecessary cost and eliminate waste, thereby increasing the percentage of time that may be devoted to value-adding activities. Supply chain technology principles were assessed and the application thereof, sought to understand its efficiency and effectiveness. This study was intended to identify supply chain cost dimensions with a focus on the optimal use of supply chain technology. Within the current supply chain context, the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) was explored to identify opportunities. A supply chain audit tool (SCAT) was developed which had proven to be an effective tool to analyse it’s logistics functions. Implementation of remedial tools through the SCAT could result in a leaner, cost optimal and more value-adding process. The result of conducting individual organisational improvements is expected to result in an overall improvement in the total supply chain. These supply chain cost drivers were rooted in cost, quality, safety and product performance. Recommendations on further improvements were also offered.

Many writers consider it "desirable" that teachers hold "democratic" attitudes towards those they teach. A number of studies have indicated that the Minnesota Teacher Attitude Inventory (MTAI) may be used as an indicator of a respondents "democratic" attitudes towards pupils. Several researchers using the MTAI to study student teacher attitudes have shown that groups of secondary student teachers obtained significantly lower mean scores than did groups of elementary student teachers. This finding may indicate that elementary student teachers tend to hold more "democratic" attitudes towards the education of children generally than do secondary student teachers. Such an interpretation could serve as a basis for criticism of the procedures whereby candidates for secondary teaching are selected and trained. In this study, a rival interpretation was advanced and tested. The writer proposed that the aforementioned finding may indicate that student teachers generally hold different attitudes towards children of different age and grade levels. In an experimental test of this interpretation, the writer examined the credibility of three major propositions: 1. Secondary student teachers completing the MTAI read such general words as "pupil" and express attitudes which they consider to apply more appropriately to grade eight students than, to grade four students; however, elementary student teachers express attitudes which they consider to apply more appropriately to grade four students than to grade eight students. 2. Secondary and elementary student teachers obtain higher scores when they respond to the MTAI with reference to grade four students than they do when they respond to the MTAI with reference to grade eight students. 3. There is no difference between the mean scores of elementary and secondary student teachers when both groups respond to the MTAI with reference to students of the same specified grade level (either grade four or grade eight). Each of 294 randomly selected elementary and secondary student teachers in a one-year graduate transfer program received an Inventory in one of three forms: the MTAI in its standard form, the MTAI in a form requiring completion with reference to grade four students or the MTAI in a form requiring completion with reference to grade eight students. Scores of 214 respondents were arranged in a 3x2x2 factorial design with the following three fixed factors: the "MTAI Condition" for the subject (3 forms), "Sex" of the subject (2 forms) and "Specialty" of the subject (elementary or secondary). Twenty-four elementary and thirty-eight secondary subjects who completed the standard form of the MTAI indicated the grade level (either four or eight) to which they considered their responses to apply most appropriately. Their choices were tallied in a 2x2 contingency table. Results of a chi-square test supported the first proposition. That is, secondary respondents tended to consider their expressed attitudes to apply more to grade eight students than to grade four students, and elementary respondents tended to reverse the order of the grades. Results of analysis of variance and multiple comparisons did not support the second and third propositions. Neither elementary nor secondary subjects differed in their MTAI scores with reference to grade four and grade eight pupils. The results indicated that elementary subjects had higher scores than secondary subjects with reference to both grade four and grade eight pupils. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

The purpose of this thesis is to test, via a GPSS simulation, a heuristic developed by B.A. Rosenbaum. The heuristic determines the level of service a customer receives in a multi-echelon inventory system. The system consists of one central Distribution Centre (DC) which is the source of supply for eight Regional Distribution Centres (RDC's), which themselves are the source of supply for customer demand. Service is defined to be the fraction of demand met from on-hand stock at the location where the order is placed. Two distinct sets of tests on the heuristic are performed in this thesis. First, a wide range of parameter values are used in the simulations to test the sensitivity of the assumptions essential in the development of the heuristic. Second, the robustness of the heuristic is examined when different assumptions are substituted in the inventory system analysed. The analysis indicates the heuristic performs fairly well under various conditions. In particular, increasing the order size or reducing the number of warehouses in the system yield calculated values predictive of the simulated results. / Business, Sauder School of / Graduate

In this thesis, we study the statistical issues in lost sales inventory systems, focusing on the complexity arising from the stochastic demand. We model the demand by the Zero Inflated Poisson (ZIP) distribution. The maximum likelihood estimator of the ZIP parameters taking censoring into account are derived separately for the newsvendor and the (s, S) inventory systems. We also investigate the effect of the estimation errors on the optimal policies and their costs. We observe from a simulation study that the MLE taking censoring into account performed the best in terms of cost as well as policy among various estimates. We then proceed to develop a Bayesian dynamic updating scheme of the ZIP parameters. It is applied to the newsvendor system. We perform a simulation study to investigate the advantage of the Bayesian updating approach over the traditional MLE approach. We conclude that the Bayesian pproach offers a better learning technique when one lacks of good understanding of the demand pattern in the first few periods. Since inventory policy affects the information acquisition and-the demand distribution updating process, how to determine the optimal inventory policy when the demand distribution is yet to be learned is the focus of the latter part of the thesis. We investigate the effect of demand censoring on the optimal policy in newsvendor inventory models with general parametric demand distribution and unknown parameter values. We provide theoretical proof of the conjecture that it is better off to adopt a higher than the myopic optimal policy in the initial periods when demand is learned in a censoring system. We show that the newsvendor problem with observable lost sales reduces to a sequence of single-period problems while the newsvendor problem with unobservable lost sales requires a dynamic analysis. We explore the economic rationality for this observation and illustrate it with numerical examples. / Business, Sauder School of / Graduate