Software Evolution in Web-Service Ecosystems: A Game-Theoretic Model

Service orientation is the prevalent paradigm for modular distributed systems, giving rise to service ecosystems defined by software dependencies, which, at the same time, carry business and economic implications. And as software evolves, so do the business relationships among the ecosystem participants, with corresponding economic impact. Therefore, a more comprehensive model of software evolution is necessary in this context, to support the decision‐making processes of the ecosystem participants. In this work, we view the ecosystem as a market environment, with providers offering competing services and developing these services to attract more clients by better satisfying their requirements. Based on an economic model for calculating the costs and values associated with service evolution, we develop a game‐theoretic model to capture the interactions between providers and clients and support the providers’ decision‐making process. We demonstrate the use of our model with a realistic example of a cloud‐services ecosystem.