Decision Support for Smart Ecosystem Evolution

In practice, there is the trend towards the development of increasingly complex software ecosystems consisting of information as well as embedded systems. The development and evolution of such ecosystems is challenging because of the involvement of a multitude of organizations providing software or hardware components on the ecosystem's platform. Therefore, for the purpose of deriving requirements towards the future development of the ecosystem and its platform, the gaining of insights into the eco-system is crucial as well as difficult. In my research, I work on the creation of an understanding of information needs in the context of smart ecosystems to build dedicated representations that support the ecosystem evolution. In this paper, I present results of an initial consideration of related work and give an outline of my planned future research including expected contributions, along with a summary of the status of the work done so far.