## 5 Concept of the Energy Synchronization Platform
### Company-Side Platform  
As part of ESP, a CoP offers the necessary functionalities for the IT connection and control of energy-flexible manufacturing processes and infrastructure in a service-oriented architecture. Therefore, it represents the modular, service-oriented, secure, and externally-encapsulated IT system  
Figure 2: Concept of the energy synchronization platform. within a company. Compared to other manufacturing IT platforms, the CoP is characterized by the fact that energy is explicitly taken into account or focused as a decisive target for manufacturing. Consequently, it includes acquisition, aggregation, analysis, and optimization of process and manufacturing data, on the one hand, and energy-synchronized control of the systems, plants, and components, on the other hand. The functionalities represented by services thus cover all levels of the automation pyramid, and information can be distributed in both ways, bottom-up and top-down. Hence, demand-flexible behavior in the future electricity system is enabled for technical entities in manufacturing companies. Thereby, information from both manufacturing and the energy system is brought together. The architecture of the CoP is depicted in Figure 3 and described below. Most important for ensuring the interoperability and preventing a vendor lock-in is the open, extensible, and modular architecture of the platform itself together with the integration layer MSB. First, the modularity of the platform allows a flexible configuration, including only necessary components (blue in Figure 3), as well as the possible enhancement by individual additional components and services (gray in Figure 3). The development of these additional services is fostered within the ESP's ecosystem through close cooperation between manufacturing companies and software vendors. Second, each component of the platform can be deployed by different operators. This enables deployment models ranging from operating the CoP as a private instance on-premise to a public cloud operated by an independent third party, as well as multiple hybrid forms. Additionally, the deployment model is not set for all times, but can be adjusted at any time in the event of changed boundary conditions, by exchanging or adding individual modules instead of exchanging the entire platform. Companies are able to use a wide range of existing services suitable for their platform without their own extra development effort and often also without a considerable integration effort. The previously-described modular, service-oriented approach and the consideration of energy as a target variable runs through all components of the platform:  
* Marketplace for services: The marketplace for services is comparable to the well-known concept of app stores and represents the web-based point of entry for users. It enables obtaining new services and deploying them automatically in conjunction with the platform services. Due to the  
Figure 3: Architecture of the company-side platform. simple booking of services on demand, entry hurdles for new participants are reduced. Offering a wide range of services from different independent services vendors, the marketplace ensures free competition. * Services: In contrast to existing approaches, which do not consider energy as a decisive target for manufacturing [79; 80], additional services on the CoP, such as manufacturing planning and control or various optimization services, are designed taking it into account. A typical approach with respect to logistic operating curves in manufacturing planning and control was described in [81]. Since these additional services are highly individual and vary greatly between use cases, they are flexibly orchestrated using the MSB and integrated into the handling of demand flexibility by the energy flexibility management. As complementors can flexibly contribute their services, the ecosystem is able to profit from co-evolution. In addition, the central role of the complementors prevents from winner-takes-all situations (see Section 2.5).