Immune system modelling by top-down and bottom-up approaches

The biological immune system is a complex adaptive system that constitutes the defence mechanism of higher level organisms to micro organismic threats. There are lots of benefits for building an artificial (mathematical, physical or computational) model of the immune sys- tem. Medical researchers can use immune system simulation in drug research or to test hypotheses about the infection process. Given the wide range of uses for immune simulation and the difficulty of the task, it is useful to know what research has been conducted in this area. This paper provides a survey of the literatures in this field comparing and analyzing some of the existing approaches and models.