## 4 Research Deficit
### Company-Side  
Even without the use of demand flexibility, industrial manufacturing and the associated supply networks are very complex. Demand flexibility adds another dimension of complexity to this, which is why manifold research deficits can be identified:  
* Vendor lock-in: Most existing manufacturing IT platforms are tailored to products and services offered by the respective vendor and lack interoperability with other platform providers or integration of external systems. To prevent vendor lock-in, open platforms with the ability to connect proprietary (e.g., Siemens S7, SAP BAPI, etc.) and open protocols (e.g., OPC-UA, REST, etc.) for hardware and software flexibly are required (see Nos. 2, 3 and 7, Section 3). * Interoperability: To ensure interoperability, communication must be protocol independent, and the platform must be able to harmonize data models. For platforms to incorporate the described end-to-end approach, this does not only apply to internal interfaces and data models, but also to external communication. This allows, for example, the vendor-independent integration of PLC by Siemens and Bosch Rexroth with an EMS by econ solutions and an ERP by SAP. Additionally, it should be possible to establish a connection between platforms of different vendors. At the same time, since various stakeholders, vendors, components, and services are involved, the concepts for security and privacy become crucial. (see Nos. 2, 3, 4, and 6, Section 3). * Energy as a decisive target: Existing platforms do not necessarily consider energy as a decisive target in manufacturing (see Section 2.5.1). Yet, with an increasingly volatile energy supply and the resulting need for greater demand flexibility, energy and its related availability and costs must be taken into account. Therefore, the functionalities of existing platforms need to be enhanced to consider energy aspects and to provide solutions for the synchronization of energy demand and supply (see No. 1, Section 3). * Technical flexibility assessment: The variety of industry sectors yields a wide range of manufacturing processes with individual flexibility measure patterns. Besides the lack of adequate flexibility products on the energy markets, the technical assessment and integration into a flexibility portfolio within a complete flexibility management approach still requires high individual efforts, resulting in unpredictable project costs for companies. Even though aggregators and other service providers already offer audits to identify flexible loads for potential commercialization, the focus mainly lies on large-scale manufacturing plants, leaving unused potential (see No. 1, Section 3). * Flexibility management: Due to the synchronization of energy demand and supply, the traditional magic triangle of time, cost, and quality becomes more and more volatile. Demand flexibility offers a possibility for cooperating with the rising importance of energy procurement. Therefore, platforms must enable an integrated management of demand flexibility within the company, integrating energy-related data with other manufacturing data for an adequate technical assessment. Consequently, the acquisition, aggregation, analysis, and optimization of process and manufacturing data are necessary to achieve energy-synchronized control of the systems, plants, and components (see No. 1, Section 3). * Energy-synchronized control: Covering automated marketing of demand flexibility, functionality at all levels of the automation pyramid needs to be considered. Key features of this energy-synchronized control of manufacturing are the transformation of process data into flexibility measures and the aggregation by combining, splitting, and adapting the flexibility measures for optimized usage.