## 7 Outlook and Remaining Deficit  
As summarized in Section 6, the identified research deficits were all addressed in this paper. However, there are still some weaknesses in the developed ESP ecosystem in its current state, which are currently being investigated by the authors and will be addressed in future studies:  
* Governance: The concept of governance for the invented platform ecosystem is one of the most significant remaining deficits. The governance approach should be mainly based on two elements, introducing standards and a community. To enable external access and contributions, a strict standardization of all processes, services, interfaces, data models, and communication flows is necessary. The BPMN documentation presents a first step. Nevertheless, this needs to be further developed by standardizing a reference architecture. In addition, the ecosystem requires a platform carrier to coordinate future extensions, maintenance, regulation, and safeguard ongoing operations. Since the literature indicates self-selection as the most effective approach for platform ecosystems, a central task is to build a broad community, where all participants and complementary of the platform can participate. * Additional services: The implementation and marketing of energy flexibility in manufacturing companies are complex. Therefore, the existing services on CoP and MaP are not yet all-encompassing and cannot fulfill all requirements in every use case. Consequently, some further extensions and additional services need to be implemented, e.g., for advanced price and signal predictions, aggregation of flexibility measures, hierarchical optimization at the different operational levels, evaluation costs for energy flexibility at the manufacturing level, risk assessment of flexibility measures, etc. * Information procurement: While the existing energy flexibility management based on the EFDM is very well suited to the applications of assessing and marketing flexibility, there is a gap with respect to information procurement, e.g., market price predictions. Therefore, an approach for flexibly connecting services on the CoP with MaP has to be developed. The challenge is to make it possible to use more than a single data model such as the one described for flexibility measures, but rather a wide range of data models must be translated without affecting the operation of the existing components. * Security: Security by design has been the main way of integrating security aspects so far. In future research, a detailed security analysis needs to be conducted in which feared events are identified and relevant counter measures derived. In addition, standardized security requirements for any kind of interface and service need to be defined. Thus, security aspects were mainly incorporated for the encapsulation of companies and energy markets. A serious threat, however, is the deliberate disruption of the energy system through manipulation of the energy markets via the ESP. As part of a critical infrastructure [75], this aspect must, therefore, also be taken into account when extending the security concept. * Credibility and trustworthiness: The elaborated architecture and information flow guarantee high standards of credibility and trustworthiness. However, in the recent past, there has been an increase of new distributed ledger-based technologies (e.g., block chain), which show promising results in this field. Their application should be examined and implemented to further enhance the capability of the solution. In addition, it is essential to further apply the elaborated architecture with its components and services in a wide range of industrial usage cases. This will provide several insights into how the concept can be further developed for wider industrial applicability. Subsequently, the ESP must be prepared for roll-out and scale-up to provide significant energy flexibility potential. [PERSON], [PERSON], and [PERSON] contributed equally to this work.