NDE 4.0 : New Paradigm for the NDE Inspection Personnel

Nondestructive evaluation (NDE) is entering an era of the fourth industrial revolution and will undergo a major transformation. NDE is a vital part of industry and a successful move to NDE 4.0, it will require not just developing and embracing new technologies, but also developing and adopting new ways of working and becoming an integral part of the overall Industry 4.0. This will pose new challenges for the inspection personnel. To ensure the expected benefits from NDE 4.0, inspectors need stay in charge of the changing inspections. The promised autonomy and interconnectedness of NDE 4.0 will supersede the majority of traditional inspector tasks and will in turn require a different set of skills and raise different demands and challenges for the inspection personnel, thus conflicting the current “procedure-following”-“level I-III” paradigm. The new industry 4.0 technologies can be integrated into the current framework, but exploiting their full potential requires changes in the role of the inspectors. The inspectors will be relieved from the tedious and error-prone aspects of the current system. At the same time, they will need to take responsibility for increasingly complex automated systems and work in closer collaboration with other experts. We propose that the traditional inspector roles will be transformed into that of the system developer, caretaker, and problem solver, each requiring a specific set of skills and assuming different responsibilities. For full NDE 4.0, NDE must abandon its traditional role as a self-contained entity with well-defined boundaries and take its role in the wider system that is the industry 4.0.