Design Principles for the Immune System and Other Distributed Autonomous Systems is the first book to examine the inner workings of such a variety of distributed autonomous systems--from insect colonies to high level computer programs to the immune system. It offers insight into the fascinating world of these systems that emerge from the interactions of seemingly autonomous components and brings us up-to-date on the state of research in these areas. Using the immune system and certain aspects of its functions as a primary model, this book examines many of the most interesting and troubling questions posed by complex systems. How do systems choose the right set of agents to perform appropriate actions with appropriate intensities at appropriate times? How in the immune system, ant colonies and metabolic networks does the diffusion and binding of a large variety of chemicals to their receptors permit coordination of system action? What advantages drive the various systems to complexity, and by what mechanisms do the systems cope with the tendency toward unwieldiness and randomness of large complex systems?

Design Principles for the Immune System and Other Distributed Autonomous Systems is the first book to examine the inner workings of such a variety of distributed autonomous systems--from insect colonies to high level computer programs to the immune system. It offers insight into the fascinating world of these systems that emerge from the interactions of seemingly autonomous components and brings us up-to-date on the state of research in these areas. Using the immune system and certain aspects of its functions as a primary model, this book examines many of the most interesting and troubling questions posed by complex systems. How do systems choose the right set of agents to perform appropriate actions with appropriate intensities at appropriate times? How in the immune system, ant colonies and metabolic networks does the diffusion and binding of a large variety of chemicals to their receptors permit coordination of system action? What advantages drive the various systems to complexity, and by what mechanisms do the systems cope with the tendency toward unwieldiness and randomness of large complex systems?

Design Principles for the Immune System and Other Distributed Autonomous Systems is the first book to examine the inner workings of such a variety of distributed autonomous systems--from insect colonies to high level computer programs to the immune system. It offers insight into the fascinating world of these systems that emerge from the interactions of seemingly autonomous components and brings us up-to-date on the state of research in these areas. Using the immune system and certain aspects of its functions as a primary model, this book examines many of the most interesting and troubling questions posed by complex systems. How do systems choose the right set of agents to perform appropriate actions with appropriate intensities at appropriate times? How in the immune system, ant colonies and metabolic networks does the diffusion and binding of a large variety of chemicals to their receptors permit coordination of system action? What advantages drive the various systems to complexity, and by what mechanisms do the systems cope with the tendency toward unwieldiness and randomness of large complex systems?

After I came to know Jerne's network theory on the immune system, I became fascinated with the immune system as an information system. The main pro totypes for biological information systems have been the neural systems and the brain. However, the immune system is not only an interesting informa tion system but it may provide a design paradigm for artificial information systems. With such a consideration, I initiated a project titled "autonomous decentralized recognition mechanism of the immune network and its applica tion to distributed information processing" in 1990 under a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on a Priority Area ("Autonomous Distributed Systems") supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture. During the project, I promoted the idea that the immune system could be a prototype of autonomous distributed systems. After the project, we organized an international workshop on immunity based systems in 1996 in conjunction with the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems held in Kyoto, Japan. Recently, there have been several international conferences related to topics inspired by the immune system and an increasing number of research papers related to the topic. In writing this book, a decade after the project, I still believe that the immune system can be a prototype, a compact but sophisticated system that nature has shown us for building artificial information systems in this network age of the twenty-first century.

Many human diseases arise from the malfunction of signalling components, in particular alterations of multiple components of an integrated signalling network. Experimental and computational tools to describe and quantify these changes are increasingly available, providing a wealth of data that can stimulate systematic analysis of the entire signalling network and enable prediction of disease states not easily recognizable from complex data sets. This groundbreaking book explores the structural and temporal complexity in biological signalling exemplified in neuronal, immunological, humoral and genetic signal transduction networks. With discussions between experimentalists and theoretically oriented scientists, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach that may help switch the analysis of biological signalling from descriptive to predictive science and capture the behaviour of entire systems. Explores the structural and temporal complexity in biological signalling. Represents an unusual collocation of three different areas: immunology, cell signalling and neural networks. Contains interdisciplinary discussions between experimentalists and theoretically oriented scientists, in particular those working on computer simulations.

This 'Open Access' SpringerBrief provides foundational knowledge for designing autonomous, asynchronous systems and explains aspects of users relevant to designing for these systems, introduces principles for user-centered design, and prepares readers for more advanced and specific readings. It provides context and the implications for design choices made during the design and development of the complex systems that are part of operation centers. As such, each chapter includes principles to summarize the design implication that engineers can use to inform their own design of interfaces for operation centers and similar systems. It includes example materials for the design of a fictitious system, which are referenced in the book and can be duplicated and extended for real systems. The design materials include a system overview, the system architecture, an example scenario, a stakeholder analysis, a task analysis, a description of the system and interface technology, and contextualized design guidelines. The guidelines can be specified because the user, the task, and the technology are well specified as an example. Building Better Interfaces for Remote Autonomous Systems is for working system engineers who are designing interfaces used in high throughput, high stake, operation centers (op centers) or control rooms, such as network operation centers (NOCs). Intended users will have a technical undergraduate degree (e.g., computer science) with little or no training in design, human sciences, or with human-centered iterative design methods and practices. Background research for the book was supplemented by interaction with the intended audience through a related project with L3Harris Technologies (formerly Harris Corporation).