RAWIS: The next generation of automated inspection systems for railway wheels

Dear friends and colleagues, On behalf of the German Society for Non-Destructive Testing I would like to extend a very warm welcome to all attendees of the 19th World Conference on Non-Destructive Testing in Munich. It is a great honor for us to have been selected by the ICNDT General Assembly to host this great event. After many years of intense work and preparation, we are proud to present our conference programme. We received almost 1000 abstracts from 46 countries from all over the world. Several programme meetings were necessary in order to compile this programme. During the week 144 application-focused sessions will be held, 72 poster contributions will be presented in units of 5 minutes in 6 parallel sessions on Monday afternoon as special poster short presentations. Additionally, about 100 posters and 2 interactive presentations are going to be presented at Monday's poster and exhibition evening. At this point I would like to thank everyone involved for their support. The 86 sub-committee members from 29 countries who voted for the submitted abstracts and gave recommendations whether and how to involve them into the final programme The WCNDT 2016 Vice-Presidents, Gerd Dobmann, Anton Erhard, Marc Kreutzbruck and Martin Spies, who supported us so much in communicating the conference and exhibition and who met several times to compile the final programme All the participants who are attending the conference, all the speakers, chairmen and poster presenters without them, there would have been no conference All the exhibitors for taking part in the show All the sponsors, without them the organisation of such an event never would be possible and the entire organising team for managing the event We are very happy that such a large number of countries, companies and institutions from all over the world join the WCNDT 2016 in Munich. This event will emphasize the meaning of NDT for the global community with great contributions reflecting state of the art and most recent developments of NDT.