Formal specification of an immune based agent architecture

The natural immune system is a subject of great research interests because it provides powerful and flexible information processing capability as a decentralized intelligent system. The immune system constitutes an excellent model of adaptive cooperation at the local level and of emergent behaviour at the global level. These concepts can be applied in the Multi-Agent Systems field where autonomous agents interact in order to solve a common goal. There exists several theories to explain immunological phenomena and software models to simulate various components in the immune system. This paper presents a formal specification of the idiotypic network theory viewed as an agent architecture. The specification gives a precise and non ambiguous description of this architecture which is validated through the automatic generation of traces and interesting properties are proven. This specification constitutes a starting point for understanding, reuse and implementations of this architecture. The approach is illustrated with the robot soccer simulation example. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.