The Next Paradigm in NDE 4.0 - Computation Assisted Automation of NDE Decision Making
K. Balasubramaniam1
1 Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Center For Non Destructive Evaluation, Chennai , India
Asset Integrity and Process Monitoring technologies have a logical impact on operational costs. Efficiencies realized by effectively managing labour, inventory and other support services directly impact the bottom line by helping to control costs. More timely and precise user intervention can improve productivity, reduce materials use and decrease the cost of doing business.
The emergence of NDE 4.0, that was an outcome of the emergence of industry 4.0 as a precursor, proposes to change the way we do NDE over the next 3-4 years. Here, in NDE 4.0 several technologies including robotic inspection, big data analytics, AI based decision making are under development. Here, the decisions are made based on rules that were derived using experiences and calculations that were done off-line.
The future will be driven by the rapid computation driven NDE 4.0 paradigm that will leverage the technologies already developed in NDE 4.0 but will be implicitly based on complex calculations performed in real time in a ubiquitous and pervasive manner. The following figure shows the transition of the NDE x.0 technological metamorphosis over the past 4 decades.
In the way forward, the deployment of intense and extremely rapid computational models along with near-real-time computation will bring forth the computationally driven NDE 4.0. Here, the computation will assume the form of ubiquitous computing that will lead to decisions that are driven by real time evaluation of the cause-effect scenarios as the inspection is taking place. This includes replacement of the AI Trained engines with simulation based Trained Engines and decision and interventions based on the decisions driven by AI trained computational engines.
