The background of this project is related to technical safety in conjunction with the competitiveness of the EU industry. Corrosion damages and fatigue cracks are the main causes for structural failures of all surface transport products such as, ships, road tankers and railway tank cars. Examples are catastrophic ship accidents with a tremendous pollution of the maritime environment or fatal explosions during the use of transport vehicles. To prevent structural failures, maintenance and inspection has to be carried out. These activities require high efforts and are usually performed while the transport product is out of service. Such kinds of maintenance are often referred to as "preventive maintenance". Defects have to be identified in time to enable appropriate repair. However, preventive maintenance activities are usually carried out on a time driven or routine basis.

As an example, transport products for cargo such as, crude oil and pressurised gases have to be taken out of service for visual inspection and subsequent non-destructive tests (NDT). Findings then have to be repaired at a later stage. This procedure is time-consuming and expensive, especially so, as the lost service time decreases the competitiveness of the European transport industry. Despite this high effort, the risk of not detecting the onset of a defect is still implied in this maintenance process and thus failure within the next service period may occur.