Sea minefields obstructing naval missions have to be breached with minimum effort and acceptable risk. With the advent of autonomous mapping, it is feasible to have high quality information of obstructing sea minefields and their environment before moving into them. The challenge remains to use this knowledge optimally to minimise risk, time and effort in crossing the sea minefield. To achieve this, two interlinked processes are required, consisting of finding the shortest route with acceptable risk or route with minimum risk through the sea minefield, and if no route of acceptable risk exists, removing the optimum combination of sea mines to create a route of acceptable risk. This paper describes the use of Dijkstra's Algorithm and a genetic algorithm to achieve practical strategies and a method in which two optimisation techniques interact to provide a safe route considering the risk of both the sea mine and the environment and making it applicable to sea mine avoidance. This methodology may readily be applied to general ship routing in risk areas and may be expanded to routing through any area where no known routes exist.

This paper gives an overview of a discrete-event simulation study that was performed on pallet movement at Fresh Produce Terminals in the port of Durban, South Africa. The study formed part of an extended study of the logistics infrastructure of the South African fresh fruit industry and its export supply chain. The focus in this paper is on pallet movement in the terminal and its requirement on the storage capacity of the cold store facility. Specifics pertaining to input data analysis are provided, as well as a discussion of simulation model validation and output data analysis.

A procurement decision model for a video rental store is presented in this paper. The model is based on inventory management, but many classical inventory management principles are inappropriate since the commodities (movie titles) are removed from, and after a certain time period, returned to inventory. The commodities also have a decaying demand in general; hence the video rental store owner (the decision maker) is required to procure new titles periodically. The question addressed in this paper is how to determine which movie titles to acquire, and how many copies of each in order to best maximise profit. An approximated demand function is presented, and attributes of movie titles in inventory are used to classify candidate movie titles and predict their future demand. This allows the decision maker to select the most profitable candidate items from a list, whilst remaining within a predetermined budget. The procurement decision model is evaluated by means of predicting the expected turnover using the procurement decision model solution, and then comparing it to the turnover achieved using the procurement strategy followed by the store owner. The model is not prescriptive-the decision maker may still utilise his/her experience to acquire new movie titles. The procurement decision model, however, does assist the decision making process by presenting a point of departure from which procurement decisions may be made.

In this paper, a decision support model for capacity planning of bus rapid transit stations is proposed. Static, deterministic models are used at present for station capacity design, whereas bus passenger flow through stations is dynamic with an associated stochastic element. Passenger arrivals vary over time, and are driven by bus schedules and process variation. The proposed model produces capacity design curves for given input data sets and bus schedules, and assists the station designer without being prescriptive. A case study of model application to the proposed Thibault Station in Cape Town, South Africa, is presented. OPSOMMING'n Besluitsteunmodel vir kapasiteitsbeplanning van sneldiensbusstasies word in hierdie artikel voorgehou. Tans word statiese, deterministiese modelle gebruik vir stasiekapasiteitsontwerp, terwyl passasiersvloei deur busstasies dinamies is met 'n stochastiese element. Passasiersaankomste varieer oor tyd en word bepaal deur busskedules en prosesvariasie. Die voorgestelde model lewer kapasiteitontwerpkurwes vir gegewe insetdata en busskedules en ondersteun die stasieontwerper sonder om voorskriftelik te wees. Die toepassing van die model word geïllustreer met behulp van 'n gevallestudie by die beplande Thibault-stasie in Kaapstad, Suid-Afrika.