Any company serious about its commitment to sustainability, including the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals set for 2030, needs to read this whitepaper. Co-authored by Accenture and Dassault Systèmes, and released at the Davos Forum in January 2021, it quantifies the critical role of virtual twins and data-driven virtuous loops in accelerating sustainability and the transformation to a circular economy. It demonstrates how virtual twin technologies can make this challenging transformation simpler, faster and cheaper, and how they are already enabling businesses to reconfigure their operations from the ground up with an immense degree of predictability.
A Decade to Deliver
“We are in a full ecological crisis” says [Alice Steenland, Chief Sustainability Officer at Dassault Systèmes]. “We only have ten years left to transform the way we produce goods to remain under the 2°C threshold for global warming. We need to think about disruptive change.” Dassault Systèmes have teamed up with Accenture to advance this thinking in a veritable race against time: “Leaders across industry, government and civil society must increasingly work together…we all need to employ urgency to prevent irreversible damage from climate change,” reads the forward. “We need to think about new ways of managing products and services over their entire lifecycle, from design to use and end-of-life. At Dassault Systèmes, we strongly believe that virtual universes will be a key enabler for our customers and for the world to imagine, design and test radically new products and materials and manufacturing processes for tomorrow’s sustainable economy, and at the fastest possible speed.”
What is a Virtual Twin?
A virtual twin is a real-time virtual representation of a product, platform or ecosystem that can be used to model, visualize, predict and provide feedback on properties and performance. Virtual twins are used to model complex human systems, from cars to cities to human hearts, and they simulate their functioning with high accuracy. The data generated can help companies drive competitiveness and responsible growth while reducing costs and resource use in record time: “A virtual twin gets feedback from the real environment which you can use to modify real-life assets,” says Alice Steenland. “This creates more data which helps improve the virtual twin, so you are in a virtuous cycle of improvement from an existing system.” Virtual twins and this feedback loop of constant improvement are applied to all different sectors and have an impact on every function at every level of the supply chain, from Research and Development to Design and Engineering to Manufacturing, Transport and Logistics, Use and Decommissioning: “These virtual models of the real world are helping to reduce the global emissions of buildings, industrial production systems, public transport and agriculture. They improve well-being, boost resilience and protect biodiversity. They help us monitor those indicators and make sure we adapt our reaction to what is happening in real time. They are being used to design tomorrow’s economy.” [Alice Steenland]
Discover in our blog series how virtual twins and data analytics are being used in various industries, or download the whitepaper for the full story now.
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United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 2030.
Alice Steenland, Chief Sustainability Officer at Dassault Systèmes.
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