For a refoundation of Artificial Immune System research: AIS is a Design Pattern

Despite the rich research efforts and the expressive power of existing Artificial Immune System models, the community is struggling to devise operational tools that go beyond `immunity marketing'. We claim that this matter of fact lays in the inadequacy between the analysis metaphors used for AIS algorithms and the actual requirements of distributed systems that we want to see `immunized'. We strongly believe that building efficient immune systems require going back to the source of immune model analysis: the work of Francesco Varela on cognitive sciences and the need for a shift of cognitive analysis towards enactement,.e. the analysis of system cognition as the control of the very interactions of the system with its environment. This radical shift back to the origin of artificial immunity requires to extract the properties of interest of such an enacting system, and to characterize its implementation. Such a `general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in software design' is a well-known artefact in software engineering: a Design Pattern. Artificial Immune Systems are thus a Design Pattern for enacting software, rather than a family of bio-inspired algorithms as we usually consider.