In recent decades, a number of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) outbreaks have occurred in countries that had been FMD-free for many years. The last FMD outbreak in the United States occurred in 1929 and the country contains a naïve livestock population, meaning it is susceptible to an outbreak. In the event of an FMD outbreak in the United States, the speed at which the source and contacts between livestock can be identified impacts both the implementation and effectiveness of mitigation strategies. The purpose of this thesis was to analyze the impact of higher levels of animal traceability on the immediate welfare losses resulting from an FMD outbreak originating in Utah. An epidemiological model was used to simulate the spread of the disease throughout the livestock population of Utah and estimate a mean number of animals depopulated over 1000 iterations for low, medium and high levels of trace intensity. This number of animals depopulated was then used to create supply shocks in an equilibrium displacement model. This model revealed the welfare losses across four marketing levels for beef, three for pork and two for pork. The research contained in this thesis determined that the adoption of a high intensity trace system can prevent immediate welfare losses of between $131 and $190 million for the United States beef industry, including $49 million to the Utah fed cattle, feeder cattle and market hog marketing levels

Requirements in the development of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) continue to increase. This leads to more complexities in handling and processing the requirements, which often causes inconsistencies in the requirments. To better manage the resulting complexities, ASIC development is evolving into a model-based process. This thesis is part of a continuing research into the application and evolution of a model-based process for ASIC development at the Robert Bosch GmbH. It focuses on providing methologies that enable tracing of ASIC requirements and specifications as part of a model-based development process to eliminate inconsistencies in the requirements. The question of what requirements are and, what their traceability means, is defined and analysed in the context of their relationships to models. This thesis applies requirements engineering (RE) practices to the processing of ASIC requirements in a development environment. This environment is defined by availability of tools which are compliant with some standards and technologies. Relying on semi-formal interviews to understand the process in this environment and what stakeholders expect, this thesis applies the standards and technologies with which these tools are compliant to provide methodologies that ensures requirements traceability. Effective traceability methods were proven to be matrices and tables, but for cases of fewer requirements (ten or below), requirement diagrams are also efficient and effective. Furthermore, the development process as a collaborative effort was shown to be enhanced by using the resulting tool-chain, when the defined methodologies are properly followed. This solution was tested on an ASIC concept development project as a case study.

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The food industry faces many challenges in its sustainability work, and consumers demand that companies in the food industry should increase their transparency. For the food industry to be more transparent, it must improve its traceability throughout the supply chain. Previous research let us know that traceability is not a new thing, but the way that new technologies such as blockchain revolutionize the way data can be communicated. Many companies have just started to use this to trace the supplies along their supply chain and are not using the data collected in the most efficient way. Therefore, this thesis presents data from two illustrative case studies to show the opportunities and challenges of using blockchain traceability technology. The opportunities show the benefits of being the first mover in the market to create new boosts for the products together with increasing consumer loyalty through more transparency. This paper also concludes that it's expensive to implement new technology in the supply chain and challenging to encourage consumers to make a local, organic, or sustainable choice despite the higher cost of the products.

Den kommunala exploateringsverksamheten driver en suboptimerad hantering av dataoch information, vilket leder till ineffektiva exploateringsprocesser. Vid genomgång avrevisionsrapporter från kommunal exploateringsverksamhet framgår brister hänförligatill data- och informationshantering. Denna interdisciplinära studie syftar till att belysahanteringen i exploateringsprocessen från initiering till genomförande. Genom att byggapå tekniska framsteg inom blockchainteknik ställs frågan om vilka effekter nämnd teknikkan möjliggöra i kommunal exploateringsverksamhet. I denna kontext är det av frågavilka förutsättningar tekniken har med utgångspunkt i gällande författning och befintligexploateringsprocess, samt vilka ekonomiska effekter detta betingar. Med grund i en förstudie om blockchainteknikens kärnattribut i kombination med enlitteraturstudie om kommunal exploateringsverksamhet och offentlig infrastruktur, utfördeskvalitativa intervjuer. Intervjuobjekt var chefer för kommunala exploateringskontoroch myndigheten för digital förvaltning. En litteraturstudie om blockchainteknikenstillämpning utfördes parallellt med en rättsdogmatisk undersökning om nämnda tekniskaförutsättningar i kommunal exploateringsverksamhet. En analys av intervjuernapåvisar revisionsrapporternas iakttagna brister. Blockchaintekniken visar potential i atttillhandahålla en distribuerad databas som är transparent, tillförlitlig och säker. Detföreligger inga juridiska hinder för att tillämpa blockchainteknik. Resultatet indikeraratt kommunal exploateringsverksamhet bearbetar flera parallella uppsättningar av dataoch information kontinuerligt. Härvid kan blockchainteknik användas för att byggaen gemensam offentlig infrastruktur som tillgodoser data- och informationsförsörjninggenom exploateringsprocessen. Upprättandet av sådan infrastruktur är möjlig, men kräveren långsiktig juridisk lösning för att utse datavärdskap, ansvar, samt fördelningenav kostnader för anläggande och drift. Ett sådant arkitekurramverk med färre osäkerheter,bättre indexering och mer effektiv handläggning ger överblickbarhet, insyn ochmöjlighet att mäta förvaltningsresultat vilket kan öka värdet av kommunala exploateringstillgångar.

The implementation of smart contract technology with their plausible applications in a business to business are explored. The thesis work shows how Blockchain technology works on the concept of decentralized system which is beneficial to eliminate the need for central authority. The thesis focuses on elimination of challenges pertaining to the selected departments in an organization. The thesis resolves challenges pertaining to lack of transparency, traceability and significant time-delays while in the process of decision making. The influence of blockchain technology and smart contract technology to eliminate these challenges are discussed. Logic of the smart contract and working of the blockchain pertaining to a specific industrial case study are demonstrated. Methodology to set up a smart contract interface in a business to business setting is investigated in this thesis. An observation study has been done in order to show how transparency, traceability and time delay in decision making is achieved by using smart contract interface. This thesis also shows how the blockchain and smart contract technology tries to implement coordination theory.

For years the issue of food waste has been recognized and quantified; however, food safety issues often go unrecognized as a source of food waste. One objective of this research is to estimate quantities and monetary value of fruits and vegetables implicated in food safety recalls, and thus wasted. Using publicly available data we identified all recalls involving vegetable or fruit commodities contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, pathogenic E. coli, or Salmonella during 2015-2018. When quantities were provided, monetary value of recalled product was calculated using USDA ERS 2016 average retail prices. Although data limitations only allowed analysis of 17% of the recalls that met the criteria of this study, we estimated an annual loss of 38 million pounds and $61 million in revenue. Overall this shows that food safety issues can result in food waste, therefore mitigation strategies are needed. There are many ways that produce can become contaminated, however contaminated soils are a potential source of produce contamination and treatments to mitigate this risk while maintaining soil health is lacking. Current biofumigation methods that use glucosinolate hydrolysis products in mustard seed meal to control plant pathogens could also be effective against foodborne pathogens in soil. The purpose of this research is to determine the fate of E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella, and L. monocytogenes in soil treated with Brassica spp seed meal and plant material. Seed meals were successful in reducing pathogen concentrations in soil, significant reductions (p < 0.05) of E. coli O157:H7, L. monocytogenes, and Salmonella were observed in soil over 72 hours with the addition of 1.0 and 1.5 g of mustard seed meal. Increasing the seed meal concentration did not significantly (p > 0.05) increase the observed log reduction for L. monocytogenes or Salmonella, reductions ranged from 5.6 – 5.9 log CFU/g. However, for E. coli O157:H7 seed meal concentration was significant (p < 0.05). A 5.7 log CFU/g decrease was observed when 1.5 g of seed meal was used which was larger than 3.5 log CFU/g reduction observed with 1.0 g. Findings suggest that biofumigation with mustard seed meal could potentially be used to reduce E. coli O157:H7, L. monocytogenes, and Salmonella in contaminated soil. However, the use of plant material was not as successful as the use of the processed seed meals. In soil or in the absence of soil Brassica spp. plant material at 10% 15%, and 75% significantly increased E. coli O157:H7, L. monocytogenes, and Salmonella concentrations (p < 0.05). The results of these studies support literature indicating Brassica spp. processed plant products, like seed meals or extracts may be a more effective strategy in reducing human pathogen concentrations in contaminated agricultural soils. While the process of Biofumigation using Brassica spp. cover crops has been successful in eliminating plant pests from agricultural soils, due to its low isothiocyanate release efficiency and reactivity in soil organic matter, it may not be sufficient as a soil decontamination method against human pathogens.

Being software security one of the primary concerns in the software engineering community, researchers are coming up with many preemptive approaches which are primarily designed to detect vulnerabilities in the post-implementation stage of the software development life-cycle (SDLC). While they have been shown to be effective in detecting vulnerabilities, the consequences are often expensive. Accommodating changes after detecting a bug or vulnerability in late stages of the SDLC is costly. On that account, in this thesis, we propose a novel framework to provide an additional measure of predicting vulnerabilities at earlier stages of the SDLC. To that end, we leverage state-of-the-art machine learning classification algorithms to predict vulnerabilities for new requirements. We also present a case study on a large open-source-software (OSS) system, Firefox, evaluating the effectiveness of the extended prediction module. The results demonstrate that the framework could be a viable augmentation to the traditional vulnerabilityighting tools.