In 2017, the SUnORE group consists of a total of 39 members. Of these, 14 are skripsie students, 2 are exchange students, 13 are masters students, 7 are doctoral students and 3 are lecturers, as described below.
Skripsie Students
Marno du Plessis
Final year BEng student with a project topic related to the topic of destination dispatch – a new paradigm in elevator control in high-rise buildings (Supervisors: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Gideon Human
Final year BEng student with a project topic related to decision support for aligning work shift preferences with duty rostering of doctors at hospitals (Supervisors: Mr D Kennon & Prof JH van Vuuren).
Ally Lanjopoulos
Final year BEng student with a project topic related to a problem involving the partitioning of sets into subsets so as to maximise constituent diversity (Supervisors: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Edwin Reed
Final year BEng student with a project topic related to shared resource scheduling application of a problem in graph colouring (Supervisors: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Ricko van Straaten
Final year BEng student with a project topic related to the improvement of the well-known Duckworth-Lewis method for run target adjustment in cricket (Supervisors: Mr A Smith & Prof JH van Vuuren).
Ryna Barnard
Final year BEng student with a project topic related to the development of a bi-objective scheduling model which is able to provide decision support to producers of films who have to schedule actors for the duration of the shooting of a film. The focus of the project is on the scheduling of actors, rather than scenes.
Jan Jerling
Final year BEng student with a project topic related to the design of a generic computerised decision support tool which a decision maker may use when having to allocate large numbers of students to groups based on a set of criteria. A multi-objective optimisation approach will be followed and the working of the model will be illustrated by using the fourth year Project Management 412 module in the department of Industrial Engineering at Stellenbosch University as case study.
Jacqueline Kazmaier
Final year BEng student with a project topic related to the design of a decision-support system capable of reading in, auto-cleaning and analysing a dataset; thereby providing the user with the ability to selectively compare data characteristics graphically, as well as predict a binary outcome, such as a future decision, using machine learning and training data sets (Supervisors: Brian van Vuuren & Jancke Eygelaar)
Nic Lami
Final year BEng student with a project topic related to the design of a dynamic decision-support system to solve customer-specified, capacitated vehicle routing instances (Supervisor: Brian van Vuuren)
Melanie Marais
Final year BEng student with a project topic related to the simulation of social networks in order to determine characteristics, significant role-players and exploitation of these networks (Supervisor: Brian van Vuuren)
Monica Rolo
Final year BEng student with a project topic related to the analysis of two investment opportunities i.e. tax free savings accounts and retirement annuities for retirement. The aim is to provide decision support for determining an investment portfolio in terms of retirement annuities and tax free savings accounts to invest in order to maximise the return on investment at retirement.
Victoria Thomas
Final year BEng student with a project topic related to investigating preferential layouts and designs of queues in retail outlets to balance queueing times, costs and customer satisfaction (Supervisor: Brian van Vuuren)
Duncan Wynne
Final year BEng student with a project topic related to the design of a of decision-support system for minimising material waste in the cutting of garment patters for an artisan clothing manufacturer (Supervisor: Brian van Vuuren)
Exchange Students
Lana Qadir (Sweden)
Undergraduate engineering student enrolled for a selection of undergraduate modules in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.
Sara Ramde (Sweden)
Undergraduate engineering student enrolled for a selection of undergraduate modules in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.
Masters Students
Hano Smith
First year MEng student with a thesis topic on inventory replenishment and vehicle routing decision support system for franchise managers (Supervisors: Dr BJ van Vuuren & Prof JH van Vuuren)
Nita-Maré Oosthuizen
First year MEng student with a thesis topic related to vehicle routing decision support for vehicles that replenish cash stockpiles at bank ATMs (Supervisors: Mr DP Lötter & Dr BJ van Vuuren)
Tashmah Rambali
First year MEng student with a thesis topic related to the identification of bottlenecks and points of infrastructure expansion in urban storm water drainage networks (Supervisor: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Christa de Kock
Second year MEng student with a thesis topic related constructing an agent-based simulation model for the displacement and migration of refugees (Supervisor: Dr BJ van Vuuren).
Mattie Landman
First year MEng student with a thesis topic related to the optimal positioning of Uber drivers, on expectation, over pre-specified decision windows (Supervisor: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Stephan Nel
First year MEng student with a thesis topic related to the design and development of hyperheuristics for training and ensembling of artificial neural networks (Supervisor: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Janco Barnard
First year MEng student with a thesis topic related to the investigation of the application of strategic planning combined with mathematical modelling and simulation to ensure farmers plan effectively for future survival. For his Masters thesis, Janco is looking at simulating the impact of natural occurrences on reservoir water levels and effectively allocating water among crops and livestock to minimise the total loss of profit from a water deficit.
Shane van Heerden
First year MEng student with a thesis topic related to machine learning in support of the vehicle accident insurance claim resolution disputes (Supervisor: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Ghiete van Zyl
First year MEng student with a thesis topic related to machine learning in support of elevator control in high rise buildings (Supervisor: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Ryan Reed
First year MEng student with a thesis topic in behavioural OR aimed at the facilitation of unstructured group decisions which are subject to a large degree of uncertainty (Supervisor: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Johan Kellermann
Second year MEng student with a thesis topic related to re-enforcement learning decision support for subjective choice/selection problems (Supervisor: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Thorsten Schmidt-Dumont
Second year MEng student with a thesis topic related to self-organising and cooperative traffic control for driverless vehicles (Supervisor: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Christiaan van der Walt
Second year MEng student with a thesis topic related to a dynamical system model for credit extension in the financial sector (Supervisor: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Doctoral Students
Robert Bennetto
Fourth year PhD student with a dissertation topic related to generic learning in respect of variable propagation strategies in constraint programming (Supervisor: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Fanie Terblanche
Second year PhD student with a dissertationtopic related to decision support in respect of multi-objective mining excavation schedules (Supervisor: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Georgina Rakotonirainy
Second year PhD student with a dissertation topic related to the evaluation and design of metaheuristics tailored for the strip packing problem (Promoter: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Angelo Silva Mendez
First year PhD student with a dissertation topic related to decision support for the maintenance and design of gas pipeline networks (Promoter: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Samantha Movius
First year PhD student with a thesis topic related to the evaluation of the effectiveness of self-organisation in traffic signal control strategies (Supervisor: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Anthony Smith
First year PhD student with a thesis topic related to vehicle routing decision support with application to specimen collection in the health sector (Supervisor: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Jancke Eygelaar
First year PhD student with a thesis topic related to failure analyses of the generating units of a national power utility and how this informs planned maintenance (Supervisor: Prof JH van Vuuren).
Lecturers
Danie Lotter
Lecturer in Operations Research with research interests in (multi-objective) optimisation, resource assignment problems and decision support systems.
Brian van Vuuren
Lecturer in Agent-based modelling and simulation, with research interests in multi-objective optimisation of simulated systems.
Jan van Vuuren
Professor of Operations Research with research interests in graph theory, (multi-objective) combinatorial optimisation and decision support systems.