AEROSEC

In pursuit of a genuine Single Market for defense products and services, one of the most pressing challenges—particularly with the rise of multi-country defense programs—is the need for a secure, cloud-based, collaborative, and interoperable working environment built on reusable components and standardized technologies. Addressing this gap is critical to achieving the vision of a true Single European Defense Market, especially as military programs evolve into increasingly complex systems of systems (SoS) involving large, multi-tiered industrial and State consortia. These organizations must operate within a CWE, tailored to the specific program but interoperable across national and corporate boundaries.

Currently, each new program requires participating partners to invest significant time and resources into designing a bespoke CWE, defining collaborative spaces, tools, and workflows from scratch. This repetitive effort delays the actual launch of program activities and creates inefficiencies across the defense value chain. Yet many core elements of CWEs—such as key actors, collaboration structures, activities, infrastructure, and enabling technologies—are common across programs. Failing to address this foundational need undermines efforts to simplify cooperation, scalability, control costs, and speed up delivery. Ultimately, it is a structural barrier to Europe’s defense competitiveness and strategic autonomy.

The European defense industry has important particularities due to the level of security classification/sensitivity of the data exchanged. The industry’s working environment is becoming increasingly distributed as the industry adopts new ways of working: all actors in the European defense industry are undergoing a process of digital transformation in which engineering, project management, manufacturing and support processes are increasingly addressed through collaborative digital tools.

These tools range from general-purpose (messaging, wikis, file sharing, document co-editing, videoconferencing, chat) to more specialized ones (computer-assisted design, product lifecycle management, data analysis), and all of them require a common secure network. Most of these solutions will no longer be available on companies’ premises as the software editors move to cloud-based solutions. And while the European industry has the skills to develop its technological independence in terms of cloud, data and edge, there is no suitable European tool available for defense-purpose collaborative needs.

While this digital transformation is proceeding quickly within each company or government agency, trouble usually emerges when several different companies or entities need to collaborate on the same project or when one entity needs to collaborate on different programmes.

Emanating from the European Alliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud, AEROSEC is a 4-year project that will create three prototypes demonstrating (1) an identity accreditation management system to secure the Multi Cloud environment; (2) a Multi Cloud communication services demonstrator; and (3) a digital model-based systems engineering demonstrator.

Dassault Systèmes is proud to be the Coordinator of the AEROSEC European Defense Cloud project.

We are leading on the governance and the Dissemination Strategy for AEROSEC, as well as building one of the three AEROSEC prototypes by providing a demonstrator on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform hosted on a Dassault Systèmes Cloud to demonstrate global collaboration capabilities between multiple countries supporting a Model Based approach for Systems Engineering. By applying Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) in defense acquisition, AEROSEC will showcase how digital engineering practices can be embedded across the full lifecycle of complex military programs. By integrating MBSE into a secure, cloud-based collaboration environment, AEROSEC will enable all stakeholders—from system architects to operational planners—to work from a unified, continuously updated digital model.

This approach enhances traceability, reduces design errors, accelerates validation and verification, and supports real-time decision-making across multiple organizations and nations. Ultimately, this strengthens European industrial competitiveness and strategic autonomy—ensuring that critical defense capabilities are developed, managed, and sustained within a sovereign and resilient European defense ecosystem while improving European efficiency, speed and reducing costs.