AirXperience 2021: Toward Reimagining the Future of Flight, a Virtual Event by Dassault Systèmes

Dassault Systèmes’ virtual event to celebrate aerospace and defense innovators.

Bernard Charlès, Dassault Systèmes CEO and vice chairman of the board of directors, opened the virtual event June 22, AirXperience 2021 (Image courtesy of Dassault Systèmes.)

Bernard Charlès, Dassault Systèmes CEO and vice chairman of the board of directors, opened the virtual event June 22, AirXperience 2021 (Image courtesy of Dassault Systèmes.)

The Paris Air Show has been occurring every odd year in Le Bourget near Paris from 1949 to 2019. Its first edition traces back to 1909 when a dedicated session of the Paris Motor Show was held to celebrate aircraft engineering. The 53rd edition took place in 2019 with over 315,000 trade and public visitors, close to 2,500 exhibitors from 49 countries, including 150 start-ups. The Farnborough Air Show is held every other year, on even-numbered years, alternating with the Paris Air Show. Due to the pandemic, the 2020 Farnborough and 2021 Paris editions of the show were canceled.

The AirXperience event covered the following themes:

1.  From supply chain to sustainable value network: siloed to value network

2.  A safer world with platformization: balancing next-gen investments with smart sustainment of vital assets

3.  From space age to new space: a new wave of entrepreneurs is reinventing the sky

In this article, I review some of the key messages and discussion points from Dassault Systèmes and their brand CEOs.  

Clearly, we missed seeing the planes and other innovative aircraft that were the main attractions of the Paris Air Show. The AirXperience event brought the light on the virtual world of aerospace and defense, with the “fly to our future” motto and associated ambition to “transform the supply chain into a value network to disrupting space exploration.”

A demonstration from the Patrouille Acrobatique de France during the flying ceremony at Le Bourget Air Show (2019), a regular performance delivered by the French Air Force (Image courtesy of SIAE 2019 - Anthony Guerra & Alex Marc.)

A demonstration from the Patrouille Acrobatique de France during the flying ceremony at Le Bourget Air Show (2019), a regular performance delivered by the French Air Force (Image courtesy of SIAE 2019 – Anthony Guerra & Alex Marc.)

Bernard Charlès, Dassault Systèmes CEO and vice chairman of the board of directors, brought his first line of brand CEOs to the event to illustrate a series of applicative scenarios, leveraging the 3DEXPERIENCE solution portfolio and how it brings value to aerospace and defense players.

From Supply Chain to Sustainable Value Network

In his introduction, Charlès highlighted that Dassault Systèmes has been around for more than 40 years, working with the aerospace and defense industry. Today, the industry is going through a transformation period at the intersection of three pillars:

  1. Experience: New mobility requirements, new passenger experience, knowledge capture and capitalization across different workstreams and parties
  2. Sustainability: Holistic “eco-bill” to track both usage and consumption, from materials to supply chain integration, fueling a new pace of innovation
  3. Platform: Connecting the dots across the what (activity or service), how and who (users), adapt to a versatile demand, product usage analytics, with full change traceability through model-based engineering and production lifecycle management

Furthermore, Charlès pointed out that space is going through several disruptions with new ideas, new products and new collaboration. For example, this includes nanosatellite and space tourism.

“It is not about integrating the supply chain only; it is about integrating the value chain.”—Bernard Charles, Dassault Systèmes CEO and vice chairman of the board of directors

Subsequently, Stéphane Déclée, ENOVIA CEO, and Guillaume Vendroux, DELMIA CEO at Dassault Systèmes, illustrated with a practical weight reduction scenario how to use the platform to model and simulate network interactions across all tiers of the supply chain. This can be enabled through requirement analytics, concept collaboration, issue tracking, design and quality assessment, change request, manufacturing, production, and assembly impact assessment, jointly delivered between the OEM and its supply chain.

Guillaume Vendroux, DELMIA CEO at Dassault Systèmes, illustrated at a high level how to integrate change and simulate implication and issues on the assembly line, and how this links to supplier part scheduling and inventory control (Image courtesy of Dassault Systèmes.)

Guillaume Vendroux, DELMIA CEO at Dassault Systèmes, illustrated at a high level how to integrate change and simulate implication and issues on the assembly line, and how this links to supplier part scheduling and inventory control (Image courtesy of Dassault Systèmes.)

A Safer World with Platformization

In a subsequent session, Sappin illustrated the notion of “mission engineering” to simulate how the future product will behave in the context of a given mission. The intent is clearly to go beyond product development and into product usage performance simulation by using model-based system engineering (MBSE).

The ability to assess cost and weight implications from the platform appears as an essential scenario, especially in the context of value chain and sustainability KPI tracking. The demo was very high-level, linking how virtual twins of the product design, engineering, supply chain, assembly, maintenance and usage are a real source of value creation.

Olivier Sappin, CATIA CEO at Dassault Systèmes, highlighted how CATIA and SIMULIA capabilities integrate in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform (Image courtesy of Dassault Systèmes.)

Olivier Sappin, CATIA CEO at Dassault Systèmes, highlighted how CATIA and SIMULIA capabilities integrate in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform (Image courtesy of Dassault Systèmes.)

Predictive failure analysis and spare part stock management were then discussed by Morgan Zimmermann, NETVIVES-EXALEAD CEO at Dassault Systèmes. The idea to collaborate based on product performance and usage patterns is important. It offers new ways to gather data from multiple sources, leveraging big data to identify opportunities for improvement in both the design of the product and the usage behaviors.

Today, Dassault Systèmes claims to have a cloud-first strategy, and its offering is mature and fully compatible with export control regulations. Its solutions serve both start-ups and established manufacturers to mine data from multiple sources, which is aggregated into 3DEXPERIENCE as a model-based platform. Dashboards can be tailored for a specific purpose, reporting on product data, people and process-related metadata. Such dashboards combine issue tracking, annotation, work instructions and other collaborative tools, also linking to both simulation and authoring apps. Zimmermann also highlighted that the 3DEXPERIENCE cloud platform can leverage data science using combined cloud and on-premises data sources.

Morgan Zimmermann, NETVIVES CEO at Dassault Systèmes, described a specific scenario of sensor analysis, flight-based data captured from IoT devices, to drive predictive failure-mode analysis and maintenance requirement optimization (Image courtesy of Dassault Systèmes.)

Morgan Zimmermann, NETVIVES CEO at Dassault Systèmes, described a specific scenario of sensor analysis, flight-based data captured from IoT devices, to drive predictive failure-mode analysis and maintenance requirement optimization (Image courtesy of Dassault Systèmes.)

From Space Age to New Space

Alice Steenland, Dassault Systèmes chief sustainability officer, mentioned that she sees the use of space engineering and manufacturing to contribute toward the United Nations 2030 agenda, or Sustainable Development Goals. For example, she illustrated that nanosatellites are already used to capture the effects of deforestation and measure CO2 emission levels at scale across the earth.

(Image courtesy of Dassault Systèmes.)

(Image courtesy of Dassault Systèmes.)

Multiple forward-looking ambitions were made throughout the event by the Dassault Systèmes brand CEOs. Most messages highlighted that disruption of the value chain is underway, especially with the rise of new products and services. This included promotion of the 3DEXPERIENCE toward a more collaborative platform, connecting the dots across the digital thread, supported by an object-oriented unified data model, MBSE, authoring and multi-physics simulation tool for data traceability across the product lifecycle.

The event also covered several roundtable discussions with aerospace and defense OEMs around their usage of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to support their sustainable innovations.

What are your thoughts?

References:

Written by

Lionel Grealou

Lionel Grealou, a.k.a. Lio, helps original equipment manufacturers transform, develop, and implement their digital transformation strategies—driving organizational change, data continuity and process improvement, managing the lifecycle of things across enterprise platforms, from PDM to PLM, ERP, MES, PIM, CRM, or BIM. Beyond consulting roles, Lio held leadership positions across industries, with both established OEMs and start-ups, covering the extended innovation lifecycle scope, from research and development, to engineering, discrete and process manufacturing, procurement, finance, supply chain, operations, program management, quality, compliance, marketing, etc.

Lio is an author of the virtual+digital blog (www.virtual-digital.com), sharing insights about the lifecycle of things and all things digital since 2015.