Summary of the “Open Space Technology Discussions” on Reliability of NDE

Abstract

Materials Testing 56 (2014) 7-8 the participants from the topics C, D and E joined forces and discussed the topics as one group. The groups separated and, under the lead of an expert, i. e., the group leader, the different issues were discussed. At the end of the day the groups were asked to present the content and the results of their work. Every group leader wrote a summary of the discussion. The purpose of this publication is to present the summaries of the held discussions and, therewith, share the main conclusions with the NDT community.

Conclusions of the 6th European American Workshop on reliability of NDE

“…After the success of the last EAW [6], the principles of Open Space Technology (OST) [8] were used again to discuss the current issues in the field of reliability of NDE (see [7] for the description of the OST and for the results of the previous EAW's discussions). OST provides an interactive platform in which NDE professionals can be brought together to discuss topics that interest them.…”

“…the gap in knowledge (missing knowledge on human factors), the gap in communication (e.g. missing communication between NDE and the human factors field), and the gap in implementation (the findings are not known and/or not implemented in the practice)-identified during the previous Workshop [7]-was further addressed and the methods for overcoming some of them were discussed. Some efforts in closing the gaps have been acknowledged, e.g.…”

“…The fifth European American Workshop in 2013 [6], [7] had its focus on the question "What is the 'delta' between our existing reliability evaluation or qualification methods and the real performance under everyday field conditions?". In the open space technology discussion, the information exchange between NDE providers and customers as well as between science and industry-especially concerning shortcomings of mechanized or automated testing-were identified as weak-points.…”

Advanced reliability methods – A review

“…These methods provide a way to accomplish the process of combining data to modify statistical distributions, but they do not provide simple methods to determine how. The questions of how to weight different sources of data and how to select prior distributions are active topics of discussion in the community [7]. Bayesian methods can also replace likelihood methods for fitting distributions to POD estimates, although they are typically less efficient.…”

“…Bayesian methods have been proposed by multiple authors to address the issues of mixing data, or to replace the statistical POD model fit methods of MIL-HDBK-1823 (for example, [5,6,7]). These methods provide a way to accomplish the process of combining data to modify statistical distributions, but they do not provide simple methods to determine how.…”