Distributed and autonomous sensing based on the immune network

A distributed and autonomous sensor network is proposed based on the informational features of the immune network: recognition of nonself by distributed and dynamically interacting units, recognition by a simple comparison with the units themselves, dynamic propagation of activation that would lead to system-level recognition, and memory embedded as stable equilibrium states in the dynamic network. The network is explained by an illustrative example of an eight-coin puzzle: a balance must be used only three times to identify one coin with a different weight from the other seven coins. Our network also uses a dynamic structure network rather than the fixed structures used in neural networks. Simulations show that nonself (the different coin in the eight-coin puzzle, the sensor/process fault in the monitoring example) will be identified by dynamically propagating activation through the network. This work was presented, in part, at the International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, February 18–20, 1996