## 5 Concept of the Energy Synchronization Platform
### Company-Side Platform
* Platform services: The operational functions of the CoP are summarized in platform services. Among them are identity and permission management, service repository, service life cycle management, as well as service accounting and service monitoring. Platform services are well described in the literature, e.g., in [62; 82]. * Interface to the market-side platform: The interface to the market-side platform enables services on the CoP to access data and services on the MaP via a single standardized interface. Services on the CoP benefit from this by only having to implement a single interface instead of multiple interfaces to all requested services on the MaP. Furthermore, this represents a security barrier between companies and energy markets. * Energy flexibility management: The CoP's hub for aggregating and managing all demand flexibilities and their dependencies is represented by the energy flexibility management. First, it includes an overview of the company's flexibility. Second, it supports the technical assessment of flexibility. Third, the energy flexibility management provides an API to combine, split, and adapt flexibility for optimized usage. However, the optimization is not part of the energy flexibility management and is provided by third party services instead. Furthermore, the energy flexibility management is responsible for controlling the implementation of demand flexibility measures and communication with energy markets. Most likely, the functionality of the energy flexibility management will be integrated or at least closely connected to a company's EMS. * Manufacturing service bus: An integration layer for manufacturing companies needs to ease reconfiguration, enable a loose coupling, allow for asynchronous communication, and offer standards-based integration [83]. The MSB meets these requirements, as well as additional ones as described in [84]. It provides an abstraction layer for different protocols, which can easily be extended by additional interfaces. The purpose of this abstraction layer is to harmonize data models by allowing individual data objects to be mapped flexibly to each other. This mapping can either be modeled automatically via a self-description or manually. Furthermore, the easy extensibility enables effortless additions of protocols, which can either be proprietary or open. Consequently, the MSB can also be used to translate proprietary protocols (e.g., Siemens S7) to open protocols (e.g., OPC-UA). Summarizing, the MSB ensures interoperability between all components of the CoP in the sense of a close cooperation of independent, heterogeneous systems in order to exchange information efficiently and in a usable manner. * Smart connector: The smart connector is designed as a bidirectional interface to access machines and their respective PLCs from higher-level IT systems. Therefore, it extends the MSB by translating proprietary PLC protocols to open IT protocols and allows for process data and machine data acquisition. Additionally, the smart connector's machine interface is designed to process energy data and to transfer it to the generic EFDM to model demand flexibility. Moreover, orchestrated by services on the CoP, the smart connector is also capable of an energy-synchronized control of the process, e.g., triggered by price signals. * IaaS interface: The IaaS interface represents an abstraction layer between the CoP and its underlying infrastructure. It enables the CoP to distribute the deployment of services,ranging from in-house infrastructure to external cloud infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services and edge devices such as the smart connector. If a service, e.g., the energy flexibility management, is ordered via the marketplace for services, its deployment and provisioning on an IaaS provider, as well as its orchestration with other services via the MSB are done by the platform services. Furthermore, process data from machines are integrated using the smart connector.