Alliance formed to create sustainable smart cities in Japan

Dassault Systèmes and NTT Communications will use virtual twin technology and big data to explore solutions to challenges related to sustainability and resilience in multiple domains including energy.

Visualisation of the flow of people in Otemachi district, Tokyo

Dassault Systèmes and NTT Communications have entered a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the aim of offering a scalable smart city platform that can be used to address urban challenges 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 including energy. This will start with electrification challenges in mobility and other areas, as well as support companies that bring innovative technologies and new value to this sector.

Virtual twin technologies

Under the alliance, Dassault and NTT Com said they will jointly 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 optimisation, among other initiatives.

In the future, the plan is to expand the scope of their alliance to projects in mobility, tourism, and disaster prevention. The companies will demonstrate their smart city projects at Cross Lab for Smart City, an innovation hub opened by NTT Com in Japan this year.

The alliance will leverage both companies’ expertise. 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 in order to test and improve ideas without risk.

“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”

Dassault Systèmes reports it 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 has accumulated a lot of experience in a number of city development and smart city projects,” said 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.”

He continued: “Aiming to realise 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 optimisation, 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.”

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 analyse big data. It is used to develop optimised 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,” added Florence Verzelen, executive vice president, industry, marketing and 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. 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.”