Aerospace & Defense FAQ

Dassault Systèmes has a proven track record as a catalyst and enabler of the world’s leading industrial transformations. Every decade, Dassault Systèmes has partnered with aerospace & defense manufacturers and suppliers to disrupt how products are designed, manufactured and sustained, and the company continues to rethink development, production and support processes and methods.

Aerospace & Defense is an historic industry at Dassault Systèmes, working with established companies, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and startups that are creating the future of aircraft and spacecraft. Dassault Systèmes supports companies with the latest technology tools from virtual reality (VR) and data analytics, to Virtual Twin Experience. Thanks to Dassault Systèmes strong knowledge and know-how of the industry, inspiring companies are using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, such as Airbus, Boeing, Embraer, Safran, Joby Aviation, Vertical Aerospace, and Interstellar Lab.

The innovative solutions developed by Dassault Systèmes aims to support all kind of companies facing challenges or desiring to step into a new trend. The solutions are designed to help companies from any segment: commercial aviation, suppliers, space, defense, propulsion, airports, and air transportation.

As systems become more complex to design, build and deliver, aerospace & defense OEMs and suppliers need to accelerate innovation, drive efficiencies and move to the factory of the future for greater agility on production rates. This requires a new way to conceptualize, design, manufacture, test, certify and sustain new air and space vehicles.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform is used in the Aerospace & Defense industry to solve challenges and accelerate program development. This unique platform bridges the gap between the virtual and the real worlds to accelerate from concept to operations. It addresses the business challenges of the industry. For example, the platform is being used to transform your supply chain into a value network, drive costs down, enable flexible production, achieve sustainability through innovation, and develop agile technology and services portfolio.

All kind of Aerospace & Defense companies are using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to transform industry challenges into business opportunities, either established players such as NASA, Dassault Aviation, Airbus, Boeing and Embraer or disruptive startups such as Interstellar Lab, Joby Aviation, Ascendance Flight Technologies and Vertical Aerospace.

Dassault Systèmes develops exquisite industry solution experiences to solve the Aerospace & Defense challenges covering ideation, design and engineering, manufacturing, operations, sales and marketing. All solutions are available in one single environment, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, enabling companies to connect the dots between all disciplines.

Discover all the solutions developed by Dassault Systèmes to support the industry and foster innovation on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

The Virtual Twin Experience is the digital expression of a product or industrial system’s full definition, in the way it is shaped, it behaves, and it interacts with other systems. It starts from the earliest planning and design stages of its lifecycle through manufacturing, operations, sustainment and disposal. The Virtual Twin Experience enables Aerospace & Defense companies to explore scenarios in a collaborative manner, predict future behaviors, and deliver the right solution, at scale, the first time. It is both the digital replica of the product itself and of its history and evolution.

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) companies use Dassault Systèmes’ solutions to design, test and certify their concept based on customer needs for sustainable and fast travel.

UAM is one of the bright spots with multiple eVTOL startups and major OEMs vehicles on a certification path, working with governments, cities, and airports to develop infrastructures and Air Mobility Management systems to ensure regulations, safety, and noise reduction are satisfied.

Using an engineering software is key to quickly and efficiently realize the potential of these initiatives. A cloud-based platform such as the 3DEXPERIENCE platform can help your startup accelerate its development, allowing you to model, analyze, simulate, certify, and experience your eVTOL vehicle in a virtual environment.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform further benefits this initiative, providing a virtual display to model and design production facilities, ensuring the ramp-up from prototype, during engineering phase, to mass production after a successful entry into service. Advanced planning enhances efficiency and reduces risk of implementing changes earlier rather than once factories have been built.

The New Space era is disrupting the current conventional space ecosystem with new private companies eager to push back the limits of the impossible. The world saw companies, such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic, launching reusable launchers and sophisticated satellites into orbit. Today, they need to accelerate innovations to extend rocketries’ limit, enhance satellites’ design and manufacturing processes to ensure their competitiveness in a fast growing market, and prepare for the In-Space economy.

Companies are using Dassault Systèmes industry solution experience, Reinvent The Sky, to cut the development time of their first prototype in half.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform not only manages structured and unstructured data, but it also connects to the virtual world of engineering and the real world of operating and maintaining aircraft through a Virtual Twin Experience. It is a natural extension of the digital model of the aircraft which provides you data into an actionable context and it feeds maintenance algorithms by leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Dassault Systèmes is focusing on three success drivers that make the 3DEXPERIENCE platform a compelling solution for increasing your legacy defense systems’ mission readiness: enhancing asset reliability, reducing time to recovery and improving supply chain availability, including improvement of spare parts availability and support equipments as well as consumables.

One of the most encouraging potential solutions is to use Dassault Systèmes’ data-driven 3DEXPERIENCE platform to reverse engineer ageing defense assets and create a Virtual Twin Experience. Such assets are likely to remain in service for many years to come - creating obsolescence, readiness and airworthiness challenges. By producing a physics based Virtual Twin Experience you can create the digital heartbeat of an entire asset. Its integrated data environment is built on a common data model that provides your company full digital continuity with all data relationships built into the platform.

Decarbonizing aviation can be complex and challenging – but it does not have to be. In fact, low-carbon possibilities are endless with the right solutions. By using the advanced digital capabilities powered on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, aviation companies can deliver better fuel systems, better planes and a better value network, enabling them to achieve aviation decarbonization targets.

On the platform, you can create and optimize Virtual Twin Experiences of hydrogen fuel aircraft technologies for either propulsive or non-propulsive energy systems before deploying them in real time. By simulating advanced 3D data models with real-time insights, you can redefine new and existing aircraft architecture to accommodate safe and effective adoption of fuel cell-electric systems.

Your company can further use the Virtual Twin Experience to test, verify, and validate the resilience of aircraft materials and designs. The same solution can also help you accurately verify the safety, efficiency and performance of hydrogen aircraft designs and systems at all scales before taking them to production. This helps upskill operators in a safe environment while minimizing risks of upscaling to new technologies.

Not only does the 3DEXPERIENCE platform accelerate hydrogen aircraft design process, but it could also help in the daily operations by optimizing the supply chain and airport operation to accelerate the adoption of new energies, such as hydrogen technology, and industry decarbonization to reach carbon neutrality.

Manufacturing agility is the ability to adapt and respond quickly and efficiently to customers’ needs and market evolutions. Smart manufacturing is growing and empowers your company to promptly respond to the market needs, by integrating new technologies, robotization and automation.

Today we are entering the smart factory era where additive manufacturing (AM), artificial intelligence (AI) with machine learning (ML), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) are leading the way for manufacturing improvements.

With the 3DEXPERIENCE Virtual Twin Experience, you can create a digital replica of your factories and use this to understand what is happening on the shop floor and give insights into realizing the optimal factory flow and resource utilization. The MBOM creation, process planning, work instructions, and fabrication processes output are all digitally connected and created in the context of the smart factory. 

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides the digital continuity needed to seamlessly connect OEMs and suppliers to improve visibility, on-time delivery and first time quality. Suppliers can interact seamlessly with OEMs to design components, integrate systems and keep manufacturing schedules in sync and avoid potential slowdowns of production.

With the need to foster sustainable travel, airports must rethink their operational model. They need to adopt new ways of thinking regarding planning, design, construction, maintenance and operation in order to deliver exceptional passenger experience across every touchpoint. They must achieve operational excellence without sacrificing the passenger experience.

Airport Experience is an integrated solution powered by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, allowing you to create a Virtual Twin Experience that provides insights into your airport operations, infrastructures and passenger experience. It also helps you build the airport of the future with confidence. Smart airports are the next evolution and the foundations for creating agile, digital and sustainable airports of the future.

Dassault Systèmes opens up endless possibilities with its dedicated solution, Airport Experience, to future-proof your airport through outcomes planning by simulating “What-if” scenarios. You are able to explore contingency strategies and solve operational problems before it becomes real. Airport Experience also improves situational awareness and predictability for effective collaboration, planning and decision-making. It helps understand the ”as-is” and plans for the future to raise your productivity and operational efficiency, thus enhancing passenger experience while reducing operating and capital expenditures.

To accelerate your development and support your activities, Dassault Systèmes has developed unique industry solution experiences:

• Program Excellence enables your company to optimize their product strategy and reach high level of efficiency in program execution. It allows you to implement a digital transformation around governance, configuration, collaboration and analytics.
• Reinvent the Sky is the solution tailored for disruptive startups that are transforming their market. It allows them to accelerate from concept to certification with a 100% cloud solution. With Reinvent the Sky, you will benefit from the digital continuity from concept to flight, with best in class design and simulation solutions. A driven and controlled execution with live status of projects and traceability for certification ensures a reduced time to market and getting type certification on time.
• Winning Concept provides you with a platform to define and optimize the best proposal within a bid process. Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) and MODSIM (modeling & simulation) approaches provide you with a competitive advantage to win more business.

Program Excellence is the industry solution experience developed to optimize your program execution with a collaborative platform to foster interdisciplinary collaboration from every department.

This solution develop winning strategy and high program performance thanks to the knowledge and know-how captured that is made accessible to anyone and tuned into embedded check rules and automated processes.

The Reinvent The Sky industry solution experience supports startups, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and you in developing disruptive solutions; from small, light aircraft to eVTOL, as well as space launchers and satellite propulsion systems. Companies seeking new ways to integrate technologies into product development can leverage the solution on the cloud to accelerate the product lifecycle from concept to certification and gain critical first to market advantage.

Accessing applications on the cloud gives your organization the flexibility needed to maximize time and innovate more. Leveraging resources such as the latest software tools, whenever you want, from wherever you are, allows you to adjust capacity and add new capabilities based on business needs and evolutions. And, using apps via the cloud saves you time and money without any procurement delays nor hardware costs. Designed and optimized for cloud and mobile use, Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform connects people, data and resources. It offers powerful cloud-based solutions for the full development cycle, from concept to prototype, to get your product faster to the market.

Thanks to a platform approach, Winning Concept removes the silos between the different teams participating in the design proposal. It offers you a collaborative platform where every expert can access the authoritative data, and share their knowledge and know-how. Simulation is at the heart of the solution to accelerate the maturity of your concept and remove risk associated with early assumptions. Winning Concept is used to engineer different alternatives and explore among the thousands of solutions which one will be successful to win the business and succeed in later implementation phases. Finally, the experience platform is there to demonstrate virtually the concept to your customers and provide the first elements of the virtual twin of the product. You will increase your win ratio to bids.

By leveraging a full digital thread on the collaborative environment provided by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, Dassault Systèmes can support end to end design from verification to prescriptive uses. You can also rapidly explore multiple concepts and perform trade-offs to choose the concept that best meets the requirements and KPIs. The engineering process can be fully optimized through digitalization. With enhanced collaboration on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, you can increase agility to accommodate applying impactful changes as needed, using change management and relational design. The digital thread is a key enabler for accelerating design and simulation iterations by performing more continuous simulations and providing simulation means to designers. Product performance analytics are available to enable design groups to make informed decisions on further optimizing a product. Engineering knowledge and know-how can also be captured and re-used to accelerate engineering of the optimal product.

• Cleared to Operate has been designed by Dassault Systrèmes to support OEMs in their testing and certification phases thanks to advanced simulation tools.
• Co-Design to Target is the industry solution experience developed for OEMs to deliver programs on-time, on-target and to specification. By connecting the dots, this solution supports you to drive program convergence with a real-time view of KPIs across all departments, sites and suppliers, allowing you to proactively keep programs on track and gain significant competitive advantage.
• Engineered to Fly increase suppliers efficiency from bid to delivery. The solution helps you to integrate engineering processes from the proposal phase downstream through engineering, manufacturing, and all the way to delivery.

Digitalization can do a lot for safety and certification and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform certainly provides strong enablers through its Model-Based Certification approach.

Model-Based Certification enables the safety and certification teams to run their processes within the same digital environment as the rest of the engineering team, thus facilitating collaboration between those teams. Actual integration of the processes in the overall digital thread further boosts productivity and quality.

Let’s look at safety. The vehicle safety assessment requires performing top-down and bottom-up Failures Modes and Effect Analysis (FMEA) across the architecture levels. Being able to manage the FMEA’s associatively with the architecture is a strong benefit that helps keep the assessment in-sync with the design and also accelerates the process by enabling the reuse of these data in confidence.

Coming back to certification, Dassault Systèmes pushes the model-based approach further. Through its interoperability with the Standard for the Exchange of Product Data (STEP) format, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform supports a Model-Based Type Definition approach, internally to the companies and is compatible with the certification authority’s requirements.  Moreover, thanks to its high fidelity simulation technologies and its simulation process and data management (SPDM) capabilities, the platform enables its customers to support their journey in Certification by Analysis, submitting simulation evidence of compliance to regulatory requirements resulting in large cost and time savings.

To conclude, managing these processes inside the 3DEXPERIENCE platform will bring a higher level of end-to-end traceability and confidence proven to build trust from the certification authorities and secure the capacity to certify on time, and on budget.

With the industry solution experience, Cleared to Operate, you can secure design performance from concept to certification. This solution aims to improve and accelerate testing, verification, validation, and certification processes.

Simulation has become a must for Aerospace & Defense companies to test and certify their product before starting production, and also to gain powerful insights that can be leveraged for product optimization.

For product design, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform offers a broad range of physics-based simulations, starting from systems-level multi-physics simulation to help specify the architecture, to high fidelity 3D simulations covering structural, fluids, thermal, electromagnetics, vibro- and aero-acoustics domains.

For manufacturing, the simulation workflows include ergonomics, robotics, assembly line virtual commissioning and also physics-based simulation to simulate a particular manufacturing process such as additive manufacturing.

Through their integration in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, all these simulations are enabling faster “design-simulation” iterations to reach better product, industrial system and service performance.

You can discover more about simulations with Cleared to Operate, our industry solution experience dedicated to testing and certification. The high-fidelity simulation capabilities delivered by this solution enable early and comprehensive assessments to better ensure that new designs will be delivered to the market with confidence, one time.

A more sustainable aviation is a must to reduce carbon emissions. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform helps you incorporate sustainability from the earliest steps of product conception, and optimize its Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).

Adopting an energy efficiency approach across the product lifecycle will help you minimize the amount of required energy consumption for manufacturing and operating a product.

The solutions developed by Dassault Systèmes allow you to reduce the weight of your products and the amount of raw materials needed through intelligent part design. Once the part is designed, you can track its carbon footprint from raw material extraction to its end of life. Thanks to Big Data Analytics, you can obtain information on the product life cycle in operation which allows you to identify sustainable efficient operations or not, and thus make better decision regarding recycling, destruction or resale of the parts.  

Incorporating new technologies such as electrification, hydrogen, and solar power to develop new innovative products while maintaining quality and safety standards compliance is another way to include sustainability in your processes with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

Aerospace and defense companies need to adapt production demand while continuously improving quality & sustainability, lowering costs, ensuring worker safety and health, and delivering on time.

Manufacturing agility is the ability to adapt and respond quickly and efficiently to customers’ needs and market evolutions. Manufacturing agility in Aerospace & Defense is primordial and can be enhanced in many ways. Smart manufacturing is growing and empowers your company to promptly respond to customers' demand, by integrating new technologies, robotization and automation.

Today we are entering the smart factory era where additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence (AI) with machine learning, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) are leading the way for manufacturing improvements.

With the 3DEXPERIENCE Virtual Twin Experience, you can create a digital replica of your factories and use this to understand what is happening on the shop floor and give insights into realizing the optimal factory flow and resource utilization. The MBOM creation, process planning, work instructions, and fabrication processes output are all digitally connected and created in the context of the smart factory. 

The Build to Operate industry solution experience based on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform accelerates meeting production targets and increases manufacturing capacity. It connects planning to the shop floor through a “virtual twin” to anticipate issues, and take proactive actions. The solution offers aerospace OEMs and suppliers the ability to implement lean practices, integrate new technologies and meet demand without sacrificing either quality or schedule. With Build to Operate, manufacturing management’s real-time view of plant status significantly improves their control of manufacturing operations.

Aerospace and defense OEMs and large suppliers juggle the need to manage large manufacturing sites and complex global supply chains to meet aggressive delivery targets.

The Ready for Rate industry solution experience accelerates manufacturing ramp-up and improves quality by enabling engineering and manufacturing planning stakeholders to connect the dots and have real-time access to accurate product and product build information. Ready for Rate also enables flexible production rates while delivering products with first-time quality, on budget, and on schedule. Manufacturers can take advantage of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to implement lean practices that remove waste in critical areas of manufacturing. Planners can define and validate manufacturing processes down to individual work instructions virtually to eliminate potential issues and waste before they occur.

By leveraging the 3DEXPERIENCE platform for additive manufacturing (AM), engineers can design and simulate highly optimized parts based on specifications and material requirements, with the ability to take manufacturing process constraints into account. Innovative aerospace companies ‘connect the dots’ by advancing the ability of teams across their enterprise to collaborate throughout the product development process in order to reap the full value that additive manufacturing has to offer. 

Operating on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform enables you to tie your additive manufacturing digital thread into your existing manufacturing systems, allowing information to follow a product through its entire production process. The result is that your organization can increase collaboration and efficiency as well as lower costs.

To support 3D printing in Aerospace & Defense on a large scale, Dassault Systèmes created the 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace to provide a seamless way to get parts made and collaborate with leading digital manufacturers worldwide. You can identify the best partner based on a project and part specifications. This includes maintaining full traceability for part development and production, which is essential for certification. Your company can streamline the collaboration process by leveraging collaboration, geometric compliance, and industrial standards. 

Leaders in the Aerospace & Defense industry have incorporated additive manufacturing processes throughout their enterprise. Their successful additive manufacturing deployment required a fundamental shift in thinking that acknowledges how 3D printing expands the definition of what is possible in terms of product design and process development. While the industry continues to face challenges, such as establishing material and process qualification procedures, post-processing requirements, and the precision of printed parts – those who have adopted additive manufacturing throughout their operations have seen benefits such as reduced material usage, reduced part weight, and reduced lead times. 

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform allows your teams to seamlessly collaborate across the globe and integrate new technologies, products, and services. This can transform your innovation process by leveraging virtual environments through integrated Modeling & Simulation to solve real world challenges.

The Virtual Twin Experience is key to incorporate sustainability into manufacturing. Virtual Twin Experiences enable modeling in the virtual world to perform optimization before realization in the physical world. Optimizing your factory layout and performing “what-if” scenarios and performing factory flow simulations allow you to optimize your factory layout for more efficient production, where there are also opportunities to arrange equipment in a manner that will reduce energy consumption of equipment, such as minimizing the distance motorized vehicles need to travel as an example. 

Exploring the best way to implement new technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, machine learning, and robots virtually can also provide you useful insights to optimize ROI on investments.

Existing solutions are typically disconnected, not synchronized, and structured in "silos" which requires service engineering and maintenance personnel to spend large amount of time searching for data and second-guessing whether it is accurate.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform gathers, aligns and enriches digital data continuity (whether internal or external, structured or unstructured, simple or complex) to deliver that information the way users want to receive it.

Dassault Systèmes offers your company a competitive advantage by improving business processes, optimizing parts availability, and anticipating potential issues. It also integrates value streams so that your teams can work together in real-time. By using digital data continuity and business analytics to optimize design and service engineering from the beginning of a program and to gain real-time visibility of potential maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) issues that may be solved with enhanced collaboration among all the players across the globe, your company keeps aircraft in the air instead of waiting on the ground for repairs.

The MRO sector is in a period of robust expansion and is a significant source of potential business growth for aerospace companies, such as aircraft manufacturers and airline operators, focused on refurbishment and aftermarket services. Implementing a data-driven fleet is a must. Indeed, having a better understanding of aircraft operations with big data analytics allows aerospace companies to improve their fleet availability by decreasing ground time and increasing up time. MRO is crucial to gain in profitability.

Dassault Systèmes’ dedicated industry solution experience, Keep Them Operating, aims at maximizing fleet availability.

A single flight generates a gigantic amount of data, available in various formats. What can you do with all these data? To understand the history of an aircraft, big data analytics give you leverageable insights from the aircraft operations to provide fast support to manage your fleet.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides your organization a single place for customer service with a consolidated access to all relevant data, real time AI driven customer service actions and best practices for resolution as well as cross organization collaboration enabling continuous fleet optimization.

Dassault Aviation increased the MCO Rafale fleet availability by 84% (Report n°4601, volume VI, of the French National Assembly) by using Dassault Systèmes' technology.

Discover how Keep Them Operating, the dedicated solution for MRO, can help your company increase its fleet availability.

With Dassault Systèmes’ solutions you can create engaging and attractive marketing content directly from the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Marketing teams can access design data to create interactive and personalized experiences, minimizing time-to-market by creating product launch content directly from the platform. These solutions offer you an easy way to increase brand perception and reduce content creation cost.

All actors in the industry are eager to differentiate themselves by being more innovative and creative. Global brands leverage Dassault Sytèmes’ solutions to create product marketing experiences and high-impact storytelling. These solutions unleash your creative freedom to build immersive and personalized content such as video footages, images, and photorealistic rendering. Your team can use these unique creative assets for digital, interactive marketing, and sales experiences.

Discover how the Passenger Experience solution helps airlines to stand out from competition by creating personalized and ultra-realistic content.