An immune system paradigm for the assurance of dependability of collaborative self-organizing systems

Abstract

In collaborative self-organizing computing systems a complex task is performed by relatively simple autonomous agents that act without centralized control. Disruption of a task can be caused by agents that produce harmful outputs due to internal failures or due to maliciously introduced alterations of their functions. The probability of such harmful outputs is minimized by the application of a design principle called 'the immune system paradigm' that provides individual agents with an all-hardware fault tolerance infrastructure. The paradigm and its application are described in this paper. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.