Dassault Systèmes and NTT Communications Team Up for Smart City Development

Dassault Systèmes and NTT Communications have signed a memorandum of understanding to begin discussions on their alliance aimed to drive the creation and operation of sustainable smart cities in Japan. The two companies will use virtual twin technology and big data to explore solutions to challenges related to sustainability and resilience in multiple domains such as energy, starting with electrification challenges in mobility and other areas, as well as support companies that bring innovative technologies to this sector.

Under the alliance, Dassault Systèmes and NTT Com will jointly, efficiently and collaboratively execute projects related to buildings, districts and city management, in which a collaborative platform and virtual twin technologies will be deployed to orchestrate projects on the full value chain, manage sensor data, and simulate energy optimization, among other initiatives.

In the future, they plan to expand the scope of their alliance to projects in mobility, tourism and disaster prevention. They will demonstrate their smart city projects at CROSS LAB for Smart City, an innovation hub opened by NTT Com in Japan in April 2021, and aim to work with diverse companies on imagining the smart cities of the future in Japan, according to the companies.

The alliance will rely on the expertise of both companies.  Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides a single virtual environment that enables city stakeholders to collaborate across different domains, and simulate and explore scenarios integrating real-world data to test and improve ideas without risk.  Dassault Systèmes also works with customers in industries having an increasingly integral role in urban development such as automobile original equipment manufacturers, mobility operators, renewable energy operators and civil engineering providers. 

NTT Com develops and delivers its Smart Data Platform for City, a city operating system that combines NTT Com’s communication technology network and internet of things capabilities to consolidate and analyze big data. It is used to develop optimized solutions for companies and municipal offices.  

“The ‘infrastructure and cities’ sector is a strategic sector of the economy that requires new approaches to innovate and create sustainable experiences in areas such as mobility.  Our alliance with NTT Com represents Dassault Systèmes’ first joint development project on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform with a Japanese company in this sector,” says Florence Verzelen, executive vice president, Industry, Marketing & Sustainability, Dassault Systèmes.  

“NTT Com is one of the biggest players in the IT and telecommunications industry and is successfully advancing city development and smart city projects in Japan," Verzelen adds. "By combining our strengths, we aim to offer a scalable, dynamic smart city platform that helps cities in Japan address challenges and identify sustainable solutions in a collaborative, virtual way.” 

“NTT Com has accumulated a lot of experience in a number of city development and smart city projects,” says Junya Kaga, Smart City Department deputy director, NTT Com.  “With deep know-how and ICT knowledge of city planning and development areas, we have worked hard on several initiatives, using digital twins, in which we aim to create smarter cities. Aiming to realize such digital twins so that we can return tons of sensor data to actual cities for the purposes of disaster prevention, energy management and transformation optimization, we will continue using and verifying multiple projects using actual smart city fields with Dassault Systèmes, so that we can jointly create new value for smart cities.” 

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.