Special issue on artificial immune systems

The field of artificial immune systems (AIS) is a diverse area of research that bridges the disciplines of immunology and engineering. AIS algorithms are typically developed from the abstraction of immune system theories, processes and agents, and they have been applied to a wide variety of engineering applications including computer security, fault tolerance, data mining and optimisation. More recently there has been a growing trend within AIS to facilitate closer interaction between the domains of immunology and engineering through the use of various mathematical and computational modelling approaches. These have included dynamical systems analysis, agent-based modelling and cellular automata. The resulting models serve a dual purpose: to improve understanding of the biological domain, and to aid the development of more biologically inspired AIS for engineering problems. The field of swarm intelligence (SI) encompasses a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines to explore and exploit the complex behaviours that arise from groupings of agents such as social insects or animals. Research in this field incorporates many decentralised and distributed systems that exploit the collective behaviour that emerges from the interaction of individual agents with each other and their environment. This perspective affords a natural link between SI and AIS: many immune algorithms operate in a very similar manner with populations of immune agents exhibiting similar high-level collective behaviours; it has furthermore been suggested by several authors that the natural immune