Dassault Systèmes is merging PLM and ERP together, covering continuous and non-continuous processes

The energy industry in Dassault Systèmes classification includes: oil and gas, power, related chemical processes, material resources like minerals, metals, equipment, and utilities. Talking about geography, it is mostly dependent of the country priorities of the development.

In the power sector, main activity is related to Brazil and Eastern countries (Russia, China, and India) which are growing fast now. In oil and gas sector the business for DS was originally started in USA, and there is a big room for development in other places: we have a rather limited business in Europe, a bit of business in Asia, and have virtually no business deals in oil and gas in Russia.

The creation of new DS brand BIOVIA is a major factor for further advantages in chemical sector, because this brand is based on a really powerful technology already adopted in several big chemical companies. The development in this direction will be a priority for Dassault Systèmes in 2015 year.

Talking about other sectors, perhaps most developed processes are related to metals now.

Globally, Russia is a major player in oil and gas, and power also. We built up very good references in nuclear power sector in Russia, one of cases was demonstrated on the plenary session this morning. We are working on developing this sector further. I cannot disclose information now, but we are going to publish soon information about new major adoption of DS technology line in another power sector in Russia.

As I said, Russian oil and gas today generate almost zero revenue for DS. We have one small application with SIMULIA for one of the oil & gas customers, but it is really small. This should be a next step for our development in Russia, a big step I hope.

The global structure of energy industry in Russia is rather similar to what we find in China: large state organizations integrating many different types of activities, like engineering, operations, research. In the same time, in India there are more public companies on energy market. Also geography of the country is important: there are large distribution networks in Russia, and the organization of distribution/transportation is one of key challenges.

Russian plans of development in energy sector are rather clear, which is a plus. The hydro power sector is very large and this is also a specific of Russia, by this parameter Russia is similar to China or Canada.

This topic is really important, and I would like to say that it is also highly related to the usage of renewable energy. The nature of renewable energy makes it very hard to control the level of generation of power: you cannot reliably predict or control wind and sun. When renewable energy is produced, you need to store the energy at the moments of high generation, and then release it when generation is low to make consumption level stable.

As of today, there is no fully acceptable industrialized large-scale solution for energy storing problem. Many researches and experiments were done; nowadays the simplest way to store the energy is to use water elevation/depression. That is why we see today in many countries projects of combination of hydro power and wind power facilities.

Some teams involved in the development of storing facilities are using simulation products of Dassault Systèmes to model the processes, to represent global and local energy networks, to find an optimal mix of production, consumption and storage units. But I think we still have to develop a safe, scalable, nature-independent system for storing energy. This is the problem for the further research, definitely.

This is a good question. What about lifecycle management applied to assets definition? For this our standard technology, developed firstly for aerospace, can apply. Then you may ask “What are these assets doing?” which is the different topic. These continuous processes, like management, should be covered by different tools. The new BIOVIA brand contains related solutions for the power plant processes, including chemical, petrochemical ones. Now we may simulate the power systems, for both continuous and non-continuous processes. All the power generation plants, including nuclear, hydro, coal, could be simulated within our system now.

Yes, definitely.

To my knowledge, business of Dassault Systèmes in Russia is not impacted. Being this said, we do not know if there are plans for change. We do not know what we do not know. Nuclear power technology is really sensitive to this topic, so it may be added to the list of industries affected by limitations, but as of today, we have no any problems with it. We hope that overall situation will evolve positively, and no limitations will be applied.