Immune network-based swarm intelligence and its application to unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm coordination

In this paper, we first investigate the fundamentals of the immune system and the principles of the antibodies and how antibodies work cooperatively to achieve swarm coordination and hence a successful immune response. Based on the study, we propose a multi-agent cooperative operation strategy for the immune system based on the immune network theory. In order to achieve successful swarm coordination, we design each agent to select its favorable strategy according to distributed sensing through local communication. Experiments show that this Immunology-inspired Cooperative Operation strategy performs well even under dynamically changing environment. Its effectiveness is also verified by numerical simulation on multiple unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) coordination. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.