The growing share of renewable energy generation based on fluctuating wind and solar energy sources is increasingly challenging in terms of power grid stability. Industrial demand-side response presents a promising way to balance energy supply and consumption. For this, energy demand is flexibly adapted based on external incentives. Thus, companies can economically benefit and at the same time contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, there are currently some major obstacles that impede industrial companies from taking part in the energy markets. A broad specification analysis systematically dismantles the existing barriers. On this foundation, a new end-to-end ecosystem of an energy synchronization platform is introduced. It consists of a business-individual company-side platform, where suitable services for energy-oriented manufacturing are offered. In addition, one market-side platform is established as a mediating service broker, which connects the companies to, e.g., third party service providers, energy suppliers, aggregators, and energy markets. The ecosystems aim at preventing vendor lock-in and providing a flexible solution, relying on open standards and offering an integrated solution through an end-to-end energy flexibility data model. In this article, the resulting functionalities are discussed and the remaining deficits outlined.

In manufacturing systems, a state of high resilience is always desirable. However, internal and external complexity has great influence on these systems. An approach is to increase manufacturing robustness and responsiveness—and thus resilience—by manufacturing control. In order to execute an effective control method, it is necessary to provide sufficient information of high value in terms of data format, quality and time of availability. Nowadays, raw data is available in large quantities. An obstacle to manufacturing control is the short-term handling of events induced by customers and suppliers. These events cause different kinds of turbulence in manufacturing systems. If such turbulences could be evaluated in advance, based on data processing, they could serve as aggregated input data for a control system. This paper presents an approach how to combine turbulence evaluation and the derivation of measures into a learning system for turbulence mitigation. Integrated in manufacturing control, turbulence mitigation increases manufacturing resilience and strengthens the supply network’s resilience.

Current trends in production e.g. the shift to mass personalization lead to significant changes in manufacturing IT. The traditional automation pyramid is dissolving and manufacturing IT is moving towards service-orientation and app-orientation. To support especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in mastering this challenge, an appropriate IT infrastructure and secure cloud platform have been developed. Based on this cloud platform, apps have been developed which provide the interface between humans and manufacturing IT as well as the integrated cyber-physical systems. Challenges concerning app development for manufacturing environments are illustrated using the example of an app collecting sensor data and sending this data to a cloud service for further processing

Smart data acquisition is an important tool for companies in international competition as it allows new ways of creating machine understandable knowledge as well as revealing unexploited optimization potential. Furthermore, the current movements in production to autonomous and decentralized intelligence are based on this acquisition of data. This paper deals with the challenge of developing a new approach for data acquisition in industrial environments, recognizing the need for a user-friendly designed system supporting the operator in his work rather than distracting him. Moreover, this gathered data is the basis for data-driven process optimization and creation of new knowledge

Based on the goal of exiting nuclear and fossil energies within the electricity generation, the percentage of renewable energies in the energy mix rises. Due to renewable energies’ dependence on natural resources like sun or wind this development leads to a volatile energy supply on the markets. To satisfy their customers’ needs even with a volatile energy supply, especially companies of the manufacturing sector need to consider this development. Production processes need to be developed further to be more energy efficient and to be adaptable in their energy demand to volatile supply. This includes being operable on various power levels or with different kinds of energy such as electricity or gas. Energy-flexible production processes need to be supported by flexible IT solutions. While there are already solutions for demand-side-management on the company side as well as on the market side, there are no holistic solutions yet, allowing for integration regardless of company or market boundaries. Therefore, this paper presents the concept of a service-oriented architecture for a flexible IT-platform to synchronize energy demands with volatile markets. A holistic approach allows for integration of companies as well as energy markets and enables an automated and efficient exploitation of demand response potentials