Progress on investigating immune computation

Immune computation is a burgeoning computing mechanism that is inspired from some mechanisms of natural immune system, and it can be used in computer systems and control systems. To investigate immune computation, the artificial immune system and the immune algorithm were defined. Two ideas for designing the immune algorithms were proposed, and the ideas included the method for simulating white boxes and the method for simulating black boxes. The designs of the immune algorithms were compared and analyzed. Some applications for the immune algorithms were introduced, and the applications included optimization of solution, anti-virus, fault diagnosis, robust control, intelligent network, intrusion prevention, fault tolerance, pattern matching, classification and decision etc. Two bottleneck problems for investigating the immune algorithms were analyzed and some crucial issues for investigating immune algorithms in future were proposed. The subset relations between the artificial immune system and artificial intelligence were analyzed, and the status of the artificial immune system among the computation intelligence was discussed.