William, who is a lecturer and researcher within the School of Information Technology on the campus, joined the NWU in 2013 and is an expert in decision support systems. By combining his experience within the industrial manufacturing environment (as a process engineer and a senior manager) with his academic know-how and research skills, he enrolled for his PhD in operational research to propose a framework for a new experimental design approach.
In his thesis: A framework for establishing an experimental design approach in industrial data mining, an experimental design approach is recommended to support analysts and management for strategic operational decision making for process improvement. The recommended experimental design approach uses industrial data mining to inform the design of experiments for process improvement.
The developed framework consists of two main components, one being data mining and similar methodologies; and the second being data analysis following a quality statistical modelling and data mining process. The focus is on process improvement using an experimental design approach, where data analytics on databases is applied to reduce the impact of experimentation cost and time. This is accomplished by determining the experienced operational region and predicting the operational region for future experimentation and process improvement.
* The promotor of this study was Prof PD Pretorius.
Dr William Henry van Blerk
