IT ecosystems: A new paradigm for engineering complex adaptive software systems

Today's software-intensive systems are among the most complex artifacts created by men. This is due to ever increasing requirements and functionality of the software on the one hand, and to rising structural complexity with respect to size, interconnectedness, and distribution on the other hand. Engineering and controlling these systems pushes existing software engineering approaches to (and beyond) their limits [1]. This paper describes the concept of IT ecosystems as a new approach for addressing this challenge from the perspective of software engineering. The concept and approaches described were developed in a large interdisciplinary research project (www.it-oekosysteme.org); we present first results including a validation scenario of a smart airport, which has been devised and implemented in the project, aiming at a comprehensive approach to IT ecosystems engineering.

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