Immunology as a Metaphor for Computational ... - Napier University

AbstractThe biological immune system exhibits powerful information processing capabilities,and therefore is of great interest to the computer scientist. A rapidly expandingresearch area has attempted to model many of the features inherent in the natural immunesystem in order to solve complex computational problems. This thesis examinesthe metaphor in detail, in an effort to understand and capitalise on those features ofthe metaphor which distinguish it from other existing methodologies. Two problemdomains are considered — those of scheduling and data-clustering. It is argued thatthese domains exhibit similar characteristics to the environment in which the biologicalimmune system operates and therefore that they are suitable candidates for applicationof the metaphor. For each problem domain, two distinct models are developed, incorporatinga variety of immunological principles. The models are tested on a number ofartifical benchmark datasets. The success of the models on the problems consideredconfirms the utility of the metaphor.i