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 . The nature of imbs is condensed as three properties a self maintenance system based on the self counterpart of the system a distributed system forming an ad hoc network with specific recognition and an adaptive system based on selection as opposed to instruction other views for developing information systems related to the immune system are also reviewed briefly. This immunity based system has much more sophisticated notions of identity and protection than those a orded by current operating systems and it would provide a general purpose protection system to augment current computer security systems the security of computer systems depends on such activities as detecting unauthorized use of computer facilities maintaining the integrity of data les and preventing the spread of computer virusesthe problem of protecting computer systems from harmful . Immunity based systems a survey abstract biological systems such as human beings can be regarded as sophisticated information processing systems and can be expected to provide inspiration for various ideas to science and engineering biologically motivated information processing systems can be classified into brain nervous systems neural networks genetic systems evolutionary algorithms . Download citation defining immunity based systems this chapter defines immunity based systems imbs in relation to the immune system as an information system summarized in chap 3 to clarify