## 1 Introduction and Motivation  
The mitigation of climate change is without a doubt one of the biggest challenges facing humanity [1]. The effects of global warming are already perceptible, e.g., the global increase in extreme weather events [2]. Climate change will not only cause irreversible damage to our environment, but will also have a big financial impact on the world economy. Thus, global warming of 1.5 degrees centigrade is expected to cause damages of 72 trillion U.S. dollars by 2060 [3]. This leads to growing environmental awareness and puts pressure on political and economic leaders all over the world to increase their efforts for a sustainable energy system, because power generation contributes one third of global emissions [4]. As a consequence, the renewable energy consumption in Europe, for example, has more than doubled in the last twenty years. Nevertheless, there is still a long way to go, as renewables still held a relatively small share of 13.2 percent of the total energy consumption in 2018 [5].  
Germany was one of the first industrial countries to initiate an ambitious energy transition and increase the share of electricity from renewable sources up to 80 percent by 2050 [6]. Currently, 38 percent of the electricity is generated from renewable sources [7]. Of this, two thirds are contributed by wind and solar, which are therefore key to achieving the sustainability goals. However, power generation from these sources depends strongly on the instantaneous weather conditions and thus fluctuates significantly. As conventional power plants are easier to control and can be adapted to the actual energy demand, this characteristic presents a new challenge for balancing electricity supply and demand in the power grid. Thus, to match the increased share of wind and solar power, the grid operators are making greater efforts to ensure the power grid stability by temporarily activating reserves or turning off power plants. The costs for such measures have more than doubled in the last five years [8].  
Besides the reactive management on the power generation side, the flexible adaption of energy demand is a way to balance the power grid. This mechanism is commonly known as DR and is usually supported by IT. Triggered by external incentives, e.g., price signals, electricity consumers have to reduce their power demand in times of low energy availability and vice versa. Since industry consumes the biggest share of electricity globally, this sector has also the biggest potential for balancing the power grid [9]. However, this calls for a new collaboration approach between industry and energy providers, which requires new mechanisms and interaction types for cost-competitive energy procurement against the background of increasing uncertainty and volatility. To enable industry to adapt its energy consumption actively, the technical and organizational preconditions must be developed into an eligible platform ecosystem, in which all stakeholders can take part.  
In this paper, an overview of existing platform ecosystems in this field is given, and corresponding research is initially presented in Section 2. In the next step, a detailed specification analysis summarizes the current conditions of industry and the energy markets. In Section 4, additional requirements are analyzed before the research deficit is derived. The results with regard to addressing the identified deficits are presented in Section 5, and the paper concludes with a summary in Section 6, as well as an outlook on future research in Section 7.