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In order to facilitate the materials handling requirements of production structures configured for Mass Customisation Manufacturing, the design of requisite materials handling and routing systems must encompass new conceptual properties. Materials handling and routing systems with the capacity to support higher-level management systems would allow for mediated task allocation and structured vertical integration of these systems into existing manufacturing execution and management systems. Thus, a global objective in designing a materials handling and routing system, for such production configurations. is to provide a flexible system mechanism with minimal policy on system usage. With the recent developments in mobile robot technologies, due to various advancements in embedded system, computational, and communication infrastructures, mobile robot platforms can be developed that are robust and reliable, with operating structures incorporating bounded autonomy. With the addition of materials handling hardware, autonomous agent architectures, structured communication protocols and robotic software systems, these mobile robot platforms can provide viable solution mechanisms in realising real-time flexible materials handling in production environments facilitating Mass Customisation Manufacturing. This dissertation covers the research and development of a materials handling and routing system implementation architecture, for production environments facilitating Mass Customisation Manufacturing. The materials handling and routing task environment in such production structures is characterised in order to provide a well defined problem space for research purposes. A physical instance of a functional subset of the architecture is constructed consisting of a semi-autonomous mobile robot platform equipped with the infrastructure for materials handling and routing task execution. The architecture orientates the mobile robot platform in such a way as to present a collection of functional units, integrated and configured for a range of applications, and prevents viewpoints in the sense of monolithic mobile robots less susceptible to reconfiguration and stochastic utilisation. / Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-76).

Stinkbugs (Pentatomidae) and other agricultural pests such as bark beetles and flea beetles are known to synthesize terpenoids as aggregation pheromones. Knowledge of the genes and enzymes involved in pheromone biosynthesis may allow engineering of pheromone biosynthetic pathways in plants to develop new forms of trap crops and agricultural practices for pest management. The harlequin bug, Murgantia histrionica, a specialist pest on crucifer crops, produces the sesquiterpene, murgantiol, as a male-specific aggregation pheromone. Similarly, the southern green stink bug, Nezara viridula, a generalist pest worldwide on soybean and other crops, releases sesquiterpene cis-/trans-(Z)-α-bisabolene epoxides as male-specific aggregation pheromone. In both species, enzymes called terpene synthases (TPSs) synthesize precursors of the aggregation pheromones, which are sesquipiperitol and (Z)-α-bisabolene as the precursor of murgantiol and cis-/trans-(Z)-α-bisabolene epoxide, respectively. We hypothesized that enzymes in the family of cytochrome P450 monooxygenases are involved in the conversion of these precursors to the final epoxide products. This study investigated the tissue specificity and sequence of these conversions by performing crude enzyme assays with protein extracts from male tissues. Furthermore, candidate P450 genes were selected by RNA-sequencing and co-expression analysis and the corresponding recombinant proteins tested for enzyme activity. To engineer the pheromone biosynthetic enzymes in plants, transient expression of the TPSs of both stink bugs was performed in Nicotiana benthamiana leaves. Both sesquipiperitol and (Z)-α-bisabolene were found to be produced and emitted from inoculated N. benthamiana leaves. Future work will implement stable transformation to engineer murgantiol biosynthesis in crucifer trap crops and develop similar approaches for pheromone engineering of other agricultural pests. / Master of Science / Stinkbugs including the harlequin bug, Murgantia histrionica and southern green stinkbug, Nezara viridula, are major agricultural pests in the US and worldwide. To control these pests with alternative pest management strategies, we have proposed to develop trap crops that emit pheromones to lure the insects away from crop fields. To establish pheromone biosynthesis in plants, we investigated the corresponding enzymatic steps in both stink bugs. We show that terpene synthase enzyme from both stink bugs can be transformed into plants for the engineering of pheromones in trap crops. With identification of P450 genes in pheromone biosynthesis enhanced trap crops can be made.

Thesis (M.Eng. (Control Engineering)) -- University of Pretoria, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 98-102)

Within the fields of network operation and performance measurement, it is a common requirement that the technologies involved must provide the basis for an effective, reliable, measurable and controllable service. In order to comply with the service performance criteria, the constrains often lead to very complex techniques and methodologies for the simulation, control, test, and measurement processes. This thesis addresses some of the factors that contribute to the overall spectrum of statistical performance measurements in telecommunication services. Specifically, it is concerned with the development of three low complexity and effective techniques for real-time traffic generation, control and measurement. These techniques have proved to be accurate and near optimum. In the three cases the work starts with a literature survey of known methodologies, and later new techniques are proposed and investigated by simulating the processes involved. The work is based on the use of high-speed Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks. The problem of developing a fast traffic generation technique for the simulation of Variable Bit Rate traffic sources is considered in the first part of this thesis. For this purpose, statistical measures are obtained from the analysis of different traffic profiles or from the literature. With the aid of these measures, a model for the fast generation of Variable Bit Rate traffic at different time resolutions is developed. The simulated traffic is then analysed in order to obtain the equivalent set of statistical measures and these are compared against those observed in real traffic traces. The subject of traffic control comprises a very wide area in communication networks. It refers to the generalised classification of actions such as Connection Admission and Flow Control, Traffic Policing and Shaping. In the second part of this thesis, a method to modify the instantaneous traffic profile of a variable rate source is developed. It is particularly useful for services which have a hard bound on the cell loss probability, but a soft bound on the admissible delay, matching the characteristics of some of the services provided by ATM networks. Finally, this thesis is also concerned with a particular aspect of the operation and management of high speed networks, or OAM functions plane, namely with the monitoring of network resources. A monitoring technique based on numerical approximation and statistical sampling methods is developed and later used to characterise a particular traffic stream, or a particular connection, within a high speed network. The resulting algorithms are simple and computationally inexpensive, but effective and accurate at the same time, and are suitable for real-time processing.

Unternehmen werden zu digitalen Unternehmen. Das verlangt nach neuen Maschinen und Anlagenkonzepten, wodurch neue Anforderungen an den Anlagen- und Maschinenbau entstehen. Gefordert werden digitale Planung und Simulation, Integration in industrielle Kommunikationsnetzwerke, Anbindung an höchste Sicherheitsfunktionalitäten und durchgängige Datenschnittstellen für neue Servicekonzepte. [... aus dem Text]

Unternehmen werden zu digitalen Unternehmen. Das verlangt nach neuen Maschinen und Anlagenkonzepten, wodurch neue Anforderungen an den Anlagen- und Maschinenbau entstehen. Gefordert werden digitale Planung und Simulation, Integration in industrielle Kommunikationsnetzwerke, Anbindung an höchste Sicherheitsfunktionalitäten und durchgängige Datenschnittstellen für neue Servicekonzepte. [... aus dem Text]

Plant layout procedures available today consider either the quantitative attribute or the qualitative attribute of the layout problem. These procedures are based on maximizing or minimizing one objective function. Some of the procedures that address the multi-attribute nature of the plant layout problem are based on assigning weights to objective functions and then solving the problem by heuristic methods. Exact methods guarantee optimal solution but are computationally intensive for large sized problems. Heuristic methods do not guarantee optimal solution, but are computationally less intensive and relatively faster than the exact methods. This thesis suggests a procedure for solving the multi-attribute plant layout problem. The procedure is based on formulating the plant layout problem as a Quadratic Assignment Problem. Solution to the formulation is achieved by solving it by a combination of exact and heuristic methods. This solution procedure gives better results than just the heuristic method and is not computationally intensive. A computer implementation of the proposed procedure is developed in "C" programming language. A detailed experimentation is conducted to study the performance of the proposed procedure as compared to a well known procedure called Blocplan. The layouts generated by the proposed procedure are found to be much better than those generated by Blocplan. In the literature there is no discussion on the criticality of a layout to the change in flow related input data. An analysis is performed to study the affect of change in flow related input data on the final layout and a measure is developed for determining the criticality of a given layout to the change in flow related input data for the case of equal size departments. / M.S.