Cyber-physical systems are increasingly connected to their environments, evolving from isolated solutions into open systems, and becoming part of adaptive digital ecosystems. Through over-the-air software updates, ecosystem components can continuously improve, enabling new features and cooperations. This development is significant in safety-critical domains such as automotive and smart grids.

This work examines how trust can be established between ecosystem components in such dynamic, collaborative settings. It focuses on the challenge of assessing trust in emergent behavior at runtime, particularly when systems interact for the first time. Traditional approaches are reviewed, and new strategies for real-time evaluation are presented to support trusted emergent behavior in complex ecosystems.