## 5 Concept of the Energy Synchronization Platform  
Considering the state-of-the-art (see Section 2), required specifications (see Section 3), and existing research deficits (see Section 4), the ESP as depicted in Figure 2 is proposed. This platform ecosystem enables the industry to participate actively in energy markets through both a faster and more accurate scheduling of its energy consumption (consumer role) and by offering DR potential (supplier role). Therefore, the ESP allows a proactive and continuous synchronization between companies' offer of flexibility and the markets' demand for flexibility, as well as between energy consumption and energy supply. In this way, the platform supports companies in ensuring that only the flexibility for which it is economically viable is marketed. At the same time, the reliability and stability of the power grid are increased from a system perspective.  
To fulfill all requirements, especially regarding free competition, the ESP is designed as an ecosystem with extensive functionalities preventing vendor lock-in and ensuring interoperability. Currently, the energy market is decentralized, and there are individual service providers and aggregators with different interfaces, which results in the displayed disadvantages (see Section 4). To overcome this, the ESP aims to bundle all necessary services on one platform and integrate all service providers as complementary. In doing so, the evolution of the ESP should be initiated by the publicly-funded project \"SynErgie\" (see Section 3) and later be transferred to an independent platform ecosystem with a community as the platform operator. Consequently, the ESP grows the flexibility market by increasing offered and demanded flexibility, as well as by synchronizing both. This networking and communication in particular is expected to have a huge effect on the market growth [42; 77].  
The technical concept of the ESP was developed with regard to security by design and consists of two logical platform types: the CoP as described in Section 5.1 and the MaP as described in Section 5.2. The division into two logical platforms ensures privacy and security by encapsulating their specific domain knowledge, technologies, and methods while, at the same time, maintaining a safe state without affecting the operation and performance of the overall system. Summarizing, the ESP describes the interaction of several CoPs on a central MaP to carry out transparently IT-supported demand flexibility trading.  
Both logical platform types are connected via an interface, allowing the exchange of necessary data for automated DR by a specified data model. This data model is universally valid, as well as generic for various flexibility measures and applicable in all data-handling steps for automated DR from machines to energy markets. Such an EFDM is proposed by [78]. Especially for comprehensive processes, this EFDM can be applied end-to-end. However, this EFDM is not designed as the single source of truth, but much more as a superordinate data model from which further data models can be derived. A prerequisite for this is that the derived data models can be translated back into the generic EFDM at any time. A use case for the derivation of data models is the multi-level optimization of the use of flexibility. In the following, the two logical platform types are described and then merged to form the end-to-end approach.