The field of artificial immune systems (AIS) is one of the most recent natural
computing approaches to emerge from engineering, computer science and theoretical
immunology. The immune system is an adaptive system that employs
many parallel and complementary mechanisms to maintain homeostasis and defend
the organism against pathological agents. It is a distributed system, capable
of constructing and maintaining a dynamical and structural identity, learning to
identify previously unseen invaders and remembering what it has learnt. Numerous
immune algorithms now exist, based on processes identified within the
vertebrate immune system. These computational techniques have many potential
applications, such as in distributed and adaptive control, machine learning, pattern
recognition, fault and anomaly detection, computer security, optimization,
and distributed system design.