The Evolution of Service Ecosystems Based on the Lotka–Volterra Model

Diversification and business expansion have become key strategies for modern business development, prompting many large companies to move from singular service models to diversified service strategies, ultimately evolving into comprehensive service ecosystems. Therefore, an in-depth understanding of the evolutionary patterns of service ecosystems is crucial for formulating efficient and effective management strategies and helping enterprises to make informed decisions during the service innovation process. At present, research on the evolution of service ecosystems largely lacks sufficient theoretical underpinning and focuses on the supply–demand relationship relationship, which reduces the credibility of research conclusions and ignores the influence of multiple factors. In this paper, the Lotka–Volterra (LV) model is introduced to service ecosystems and the model as a ternary framework that captures competition–cooperation dynamics among atomic and composite services. In addition, an agent-based computational experiment is designed to integrate adversarial games for decision-making and genetic algorithms for service evolution. Furthermore, the results indicate that moderate competition α≈0.5 among atomic services maximizes composite service innovation and excessive cooperation α→0 stifles it.