Immunological inspiration for building a new generation of autonomic systems

Autonomic computing systems of the future will be required to exhibit a number of properties which cannot be engi-neered using current technologies and algorithms. The most direct inspiration for building such systems is nature, where for example the central nervous system and the immune sys-tem function in an autonomic manner. In this paper we show how mechanisms inspired by recent advances in the field of immunology may offer exactly the inspiration re-quired for engineering this new generation of computational systems which are robust, secure, self-organise and self-heal in manner currently unachievable with established software engineering techniques. Immune-inspired mechanisms are often synonomous with providing security in computing ap-plications — however we intend to show that a wider ex-amination of the immune literature offers far greater poten-tial for exploitation of immune-mechanisms and paradigms than simply providing protection to a host. We conclude with a number of case studies, describing work currently in progress, which demonstrate two very different application areas in which the mechanisms described are being applied to illustrate our point. 1