NDE 4.0: a Five Years Success Story

In my plenary lecture at the SPIE symposium “Smart Structures and NDE” 2017, I introduced the name NDE 4.0 for the first time as part of the Industrial Revolution 4.0. That was almost exactly 5 years ago. A few months later, several organizations started activities and working groups for NDE 4.0. So we can say that NDE 4.0 was born at our SPIE symposium. We are now seeing a surge in activity in this area around the world. The first Handbook for NDE 4.0 is online. We see new books, a YouTube channel, two special editions of the Journal of NDE, several conferences and many papers. The key is, that manufacturing and inspection systems are linked in one cyber-controlled word. We still need excellent measurement systems and inspector decisions. However, this is recharged by creating, managing, and analyzing enormous amounts of data. We see a transition from physics to computer science as the driving force behind NDE. This paper is a look back at these 5 years of NDE 4.0 and an outlook to the future.