Artificial immune systems in industrial applications

Artificial immune system (AIS) is a new intelligent problem-solving technique that is being used in some industrial applications. This paper presents an immunity-based algorithm for tool breakage detection. The method is inspired by the negative-selection mechanism of the immune system, which is able to discriminate between the self (body elements) and the nonself (foreign pathogens). However, in our industrial application, the self is defined to be normal cutting operations and the nonself is any deviation beyond allowable variations of the cutting force. The proposed algorithm is illustrated with a simulation study of milling operations. The performance of the algorithm in detecting the occurrence of tool breakage is reported. The results show that the negative-selection algorithm detected tool breakage in all test cases.