Theoretical advances and new foundations have been reported at the Conference for more than 40 years which has helped expand the range of applications as well as the type of materials in response to industrial and professional requirements. Since the conference started it has attracted high quality papers that report further advances in techniques that reduce or eliminate the type of meshes associated with finite elements or finite differences, for instance. 

As design, analysis and manufacture become more integrated, the chances are that the users will be less aware of the capabilities of the analytical techniques that are at the core of the process.  This reinforces the need to retain expertise in certain specialised areas of numerical methods, such as BEM/MRM, to ensure that all new tools perform satisfactorily in the integrated process.

The maturity of BEM since 1978 has resulted in a substantial number of industrial applications, which demonstrate the accuracy, robustness and easy use of the technique.  Their range still needs to be widened, taking into account the potentialities of the Mesh Reduction techniques in general.  

The papers included in this volume originate from the 46th conference on Boundary Elements and other Mesh Reduction Methods (BEM/MRM) which acts as a forum to discuss new ideas and critically compare results before the solution and tools are released to the end users.