The human immune system protects the human body against pathogens which try to infect the body. The human immune system consists of three main components:
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Skin:
The biggest component and the first defence-line of the immune system against pathogens.
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Innate immune system:
Present and activated almost directly after the birth of a human. Protects the human body against most basic pathogens and removes these pathogens quickly. The innate immune system does not learn a lot, it applies the given knowledge of basic pathogens.
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Adaptive immune system:
The adaptive immune system protects the human body against complex, mutated and novel attacks. It reacts slowly and normally it learns from a local infection by the attacking pathogen. The adaptive immune system also immunizes the human body against known attacks; this functionality is used for vaccination.
The human immune system works in the human body with the following attributes:
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Unsupervised/Autonomous:
The human immune system consists of lots of different components and all components work autonomous in order to guarantee the functionality even if parts of the immune system break down.
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Decentralised/Distributed:
The components of the immune system are distributed over the whole human body. Furthermore, the components flow through the network.
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Adaptive:
The human immune system learns from infections and immunizes the human body against these.
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Efficient:
If a novel or modified pathogen enters the human body, the immune system cannot identify it and remove it. Thus, the pathogen infects some areas of the human body; the adaptive immune system reacts on it; and develops a disinfection-strategy quickly.
Consequently, the human immune system is a nearly perfect protection-system for the human body. Now, we will look on the artificial immune system which tries to model the human immune system for computer science – here only for network security - in order to obtain the advantages.
In the artificial immune system, the components are artificial cells or agents which flow through a computer network and which process several tasks in order to identify and prevent attacks from intrusions. Therefore, the artificial cells are equipped with the same attributes as the human immune system. The artificial cells try to model the behaviour of the immune-cells of the human immune system.
Examples for application of artificial immune systems:
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Network Security
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Optimisation Problems
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Distributed Computing