On the Role of the AIS Practitioner

The AIS field, which seeks to understand immune system operation and exploit these principles in engineering contexts, has been critized for “reasoning by metaphor” [Stepney 05]: algorithms are based on naïve biological analogies, are poorly understood, and weekly capture their inspiring biological properties. Various frameworks have been proposed that enable the richness of emergent biological properties to be translated into useful engineered systems. The conceptual framework [Stepney 05] proposed starting with a study of the immunological system, modeling it, and leading to the development of engineering algorithms. [Andrews 08] notes that the framework lacks guidance on selecting biological inspiration for particular engineering domains, and that evaluating a particular domain’s potential requires that it first be modeled. The immuno-engineering framework [Timmis 08], through better grounded in engineering by accounting for the physical properties of engineering systems (e.g. in terms of memory, processing power etc.), suffers the same problem.