Dassault Systèmes embracing sustainability in systems engineering
Although sustainability – a hot topic at this year’s Farnborough International Airshow – continues to be “an area of massive investment and innovation,” the sustainability of knowledge, skills and competencies continues to be a significant area of consideration, explained Olivier Ribet, executive vice president of Dassault Systèmes.
Citing the need to attract and train the next generation of talent, “this is where digitalisation of knowledge, of competencies, is also helping a lot,” continued Ribet; adding that blending competencies and sharing innovation are key to success – something this week’s in-person presence is a key element of. “Investing in digitalisation doesn’t prevent you from having this kind of face-to face interaction,” he suggested.
Alongside sustainability developments, Ribet emphasized the importance of engaging in dialogue rather than a transactional scenario – with ‘what if’ scenarios made possible by systems thinking and systems engineering. Imagining a future aircraft or a future satellite in terms of requirement, logic and physics as “not only as a way of establishing a technical dialogue between engineering and manufacturing, but also as a way of elevating …the purpose of this product, is when you can introduce sustainability at the core of this thought process, not at the end,” elaborated Ribet.
AI – “a relatively old technology from the ‘60s” – is also accelerating rapidly in terms of the computing power available, with “an extreme degree of innovation on the software level to create a new class, a new category of artificial intelligence software”. Acceleration in the last few years of AI applied to text-based information is also very interesting for Dassault Systèmes, with the application able to help and complement the company’s previous portfolio of pre-existing AI technologies.
With this technology able to unlock a “new wave of innovation,” from suppliers to customers – machine learning has been “powering a lot of innovation,” concluded Ribet. “It’s just the beginning!”
