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As one of the world's leading steel producers, Tata Steel generates and records substantial quantities of data on a daily basis, much of it linked to its manufacturing process. This research seeks to utilise the techniques developed under the general heading of Data Science to enable the company to derive maximum benefit from the data it records. In particular, the research centres on the data collected during the production of steel slabs from liquid iron at the company's Port Talbot operation. The key outcome of the research being to provide improved insight on the performance and maintenance of its continuous casters. At present, there are a number of existing organisational challenges, including poor communication and data sharing that inhibit best use of the collected data. Initial investigations focused on understanding existing data and identifying key data sources that could be exploited to explain events and activities surrounding caster performance. Initial findings revealed that, maintenance events data and real-time sensor data to be effective in identifying key performance indicators. The data sources considered contain rich information to explain both 'normal' and 'anomalous' casting behaviour patterns associated with an unexpected caster performance failure. A Data Science Methodology provided by Rollins (2016), includes business understanding, data understanding, data preparation and modelling, which has been employed to approach this problem to develop a failure prediction model. The knowledge gained from learning the pre-failure conditions from historical data has enabled a predictive model to be developed. This model has the ability enable Tata Steel to make informed decisions about when to take a caster out of production for maintenance. Ultimately, this research promotes better utilisation of current data to help optimise the scheduling of caster maintenance. The findings of this research present Tata Steel with the opportunity to minimise the occurrence of unnecessary caster maintenance; delivering productivity increase and cost reduction.

This thesis examines the relationships between state, market, and society in shaping the political economy of water pollution regulation in Bangladesh, as well as the consequences of these relationships for the distribution of regulatory power. In Bangladesh, where severe industrial water pollution is a feature of daily life for millions, actors navigate intersecting processes that have become institutionalized over the past five decades since independence. As a country striving toward middle-income status after an era of instability, Bangladesh navigates a surge in its ready-made garments' industry; the rising influence of transnational private governance programs; civil society discontentment; and judicial authorization of public interest litigation. The thesis extends Julia Black's decentered approach (2001) to analysis in a way that is underexplored in the political economy literature. This thesis uses a qualitative methodology drawing on 140 semi-structured interviews using NVivo to organize and code; review of legal and policy documents; and statistical analysis of water pollution penalties from the Department of Environment. I argue that regulatory power relations are distributed, contested, and pursued by contending actors and institutions, which are often examined in silos in the prevailing literature. I argue for conceiving of non-compliance as normalized, resulting from the Department of Environment's retreatist approach and compelling antiregulatory state-market linkages. I further develop the concept of enforcement styles by considering varying levels of formalism, coercion, autonomy, and capacity dimensions through fines for polluters, and show penalties to be a contested arena for resistance, negotiation, and discretion. Further, I extend a political-strategic framework by applying the concepts of autonomy, fragmentation, and the public-private distinction to a historical analysis of how Bangladesh's national government, private sector, and transnational private regulatory interests' interface. Taken together, this intertwined decentered regulation-political economy approach positions regulation as dynamic and embedded in social relations, contributing to new understandings of the mechanisms by which regulatory power is exerted.