Georgia Tech Adopts Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE Platform for Educational Innovation

Long Cooperation Results in New 10,000-User Agreement, Groundbreaking STEM Education Summer Camps, and New Systems Engineering, Industry-Oriented Projects

VELIZY-VILLACOUBLAY, France — February 18, 2014 — Dassault Systèmes (Euronext Paris: #13065, DSY.PA), the 3DEXPERIENCE Company, world leader in 3D design software, 3D Digital Mock Up and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, today announced that the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) will adopt the company’s 3DEXPERIENCE platform for 10,000 users (students and educators), including its full range of capabilities in the design authoring, digital manufacturing, collaboration, scientific simulation, and visualization fields.  

Today’s announcement comes after nearly 12 years of collaboration, in which Georgia Tech and Dassault Systèmes have partnered to establish an ambitious science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education program unique in academia.  Georgia Tech’s Integrated Product Lifecycle Engineering (IPLE) Laboratory and Dassault Systèmes jointly developed a new pedagogical model to educate tomorrow’s engineers through a cloud-based design and manufacturing infrastructure.

Several years ago, key figures at Dassault Systèmes and Georgia Tech realized that the future of science, technology and engineering was collaborative in nature. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a new type of curriculum for STEM in high schools was developed in partnership between Dassault Systèmes and Georgia Tech’s IPLE lab.  A STEM-oriented summer camp for high school students, in which participants collaborated on engineering and design problems across large distances, was envisioned and the new curriculum deployed.  The world’s first collaborative summer camp, held in 2012, brought together high school students at Georgia Tech and the University of Detroit Mercy.  A second, highly successful Georgia Tech and Dassault Systèmes-sponsored STEM summer camp was held in 2013 between high school students at Georgia Tech, University of Detroit Mercy and the University of New Haven, Connecticut.

“Our relationship with Dassault Systèmes has been exceptionally durable and produced substantial outcomes.  We now pave the road for further, broader achievements, especially in student learning educational innovation,” said Prof. Daniel Schrage, IPLE Director, Georgia Tech, one of the key figures in developing the STEM summer camps and the new educational model used there.

As part of the same far reaching vision and leadership in education that created the groundbreaking STEM summer camps, Georgia Tech has recognized that the need for advanced systems engineers is fast approaching a peak, as more industries compete with smarter products involving more complex systems.  At the same time, tens of thousands of engineering professionals are about to retire.  To address this potential crisis point and bring advanced systems engineering education to a new level, Georgia Tech’s Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL), a world leading center of expertise for complex cyber-physical systems, has begun leveraging Georgia Tech’s long experience with Dassault Systèmes.  ASDL, focusing on bringing the concept of an engineering “digital thread” to new learning and working practices, will include in its curriculum new graphic-based analysis and decision making in the engineering of complex systems.

“Industry faces a dramatic need for talent in systems engineering. Our programs are strongly driven by industry cases and we trust that our collaboration will bring new advances in the way complex systems are analyzed and designed,” said Dimitri Mavris, Boeing Professor of Advanced Aerospace Systems Analysis and ASDL Director, Georgia Tech.

“ASDL is one of the top labs in the USA on this topic and they will use Dassault Systèmes’ unique systems engineering capabilities to bring integrated geometric, logical, functional and requirement modeling to tomorrow’s engineers. We and our partners at ASDL and IPLE have heard the need from industry,” said Philippe Forestier, Executive Vice President, Global Affairs, Dassault Systèmes. “Our relationship with Georgia Institute of Technology is a shining example of the way we approach academia by helping transform the learning experience. Together we are bringing more industry realism into curricula and addressing the entire STEM pipeline to provide industry the employable and competitive workforce it needs.”