Application areas of AIS: The past, the present and the future

After a decade of research into the area of artificial immune systems, it is worthwhile to take a step back and reflect on the contributions that the paradigm has brought to the application areas to which it has been applied. Undeniably, there have been a lot of successful stories—however, if the field is to advance in the future and really carve out its own distinctive niche, then it is necessary to be able to illustrate that there are clear benefits to be obtained by applying this paradigm rather than others. This paper attempts to take stock of the application areas that have been tackled in the past, and ask the difficult question “was it worth it ?”. We then attempt to suggest a set of problem features that we believe will allow the true potential of the immunological system to be exploited in computational systems, and define a unique niche for AIS.