Georgia Tech has recently obtained 10,000 licenses for 3DEXPERIENCE, a software platform created by Dassault Systèmes, that will allow students, researchers, and industry professionals to expand their collaborative work in the fields of design authoring, digital manufacturing, cyber-physical modeling, and visualization.

Announcement of the software investment came last month, capping almost 12 years of collaboration between Georgia Tech and Dassault Systèmes, a world leader in 3D design software, 3D Digital Mock-up and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions.

“The Institute’s collaboration with Dassault has always been very productive and this one is no different,” said Professor Daniel P. Schrage, director of Georgia Tech’s Integrated Product Lifecycle Engineering (IPLE) Laboratory, who helped forge a relationship with the French firm more than a decade ago.

Up to 5,000 of the new licenses will be used by Georgia Tech for collaborative education through workshops, summer camps and professional certificates, as well as for undergraduate and graduate education and research.

Some of the licenses will also be used by the Aerospace Systems Design Lab (ASDL) which will be rigorously testing the software suite using a real-world problem provided by the U.S. Army Research Lab.

“This suite of programs has the potential to speed up the complex process of aircraft design by incorporating the verification and validation process into a more streamlined, coordinated development loop. It has the potential to save time and money,” said Professor Dimitri Mavris, who heads up ASDL.

Dassault Systèmes has a long history of supporting innovation at Georgia Tech, said Schrage:

“We set up the IPLE Laboratory a number of years ago to provide education and research using the Dassault Systèmes set of Project Lifecycle Management [PLM] tools. These tools are similar to what are being used the aerospace and automotive industries. They have been used by our graduate and undergraduate student teams over the years to win national student design competitions and provide them an understanding of the evolving global engineering environment.”

An earlier collaborative education version of the firm’s 3DExperience suite was used to launch IPLE’s TEAM summer camps, which enabled educators to deliver content to students as far away as Connecticut and Michigan.

Supported, in part, by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the camps helped educators and students to finesse a pedagogical model that uses cloud-based design and manufacturing infrastructure. The suite also holds much promise for university-level teaching and industry applications, according to Dr. Simon Briceno, ASDL’s Advanced Concepts Division Chief.

“This is cutting-edge software. The 3DExperience suite will vastly improve our students’ understanding of the theories we teach in the classroom. It incorporates the components that enable the full verification and validation of design concepts. The framework upon which it is based is universally accepted, but the way it streamlines the process is unique.”

Mavris is most excited about the future fruits of the collaboration.

"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," added Mavris, the Boeing Professor of Advanced Aerospace Systems Analysis.

Mavris’s sentiments were echoed by Philippe Forestier, Dassault Système’s executive vice president for global affairs.

"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."

"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."

Drs. Dimitri Mavris, left, and Daniel P. Schrage, right