Symbiosis Evolution Model and Behavior of Multiple Resource Agents in the Smart Elderly Care Service Ecosystem

Abstract

Population aging has become an important factor restricting China′s social and economic development. The smart health and elderly care industry has developed rapidly in the past five years. However, the service resources among various elderly service providers are relatively isolated and scattered. In other words, the core management problem in the components of the smart elderly care service ecosystem is how to deal with the relationships of interest among multiple resource agents. Thus, the main contribution of this study is to employ symbiosis theory and the logistic growth model to construct a model of the evolution of the symbiosis of multiple resource agents in the smart elderly care service ecosystem. Then, we carry out a stability analysis, and analyze the evolutionary model of two resource agents′ symbiosis under different values of interdependence coefficients. Finally, we use computer simulations to dynamically simulate the model and comparatively analyze the population density of the hospital–nursing home symbiotic relationship using real cases in China. According to the study, we find that the enterprise goal in the smart elderly care service ecosystem should be to maximize the overall value of the multiple resource agents, and the result of the symbiotic evolution between different resource agents depends on the symbiotic interdependence coefficient, while the resource agent uses different strategies under different symbiosis models. Therefore, regulation is needed to ensure the relative fairness of the distribution of value co-creation in the smart elderly care service ecosystem when the resource agent takes actions that benefit itself. Of course, when the ecosystem is in a reciprocal symbiosis model, each resource agent benefits from the activities of the other resource agents, which is ideal in reality; in other words, the best symbiosis model between the two resource agents should be the similar reciprocal symbiosis model.